There are days in the political life of Serbia that at first glance do not look like turning points. They don't have a dramatic scenography, strong messages on banners, they don't end with tear gas and batons, but that's exactly why they stay in the collective consciousness for a long time because they open up questions about the future, thus definitely becoming groundbreaking and historic. Saturday, December 28, 2025, it was just such a day - quiet, scattered throughout the cities and towns, without a central stage, speakers and big messages, but clear enough to show how deep the discontent is in society and how much that same society has broken down about what and where it really wants to go next.
While the cities were preparing for the New Year holidays, students have set up stands all over Serbia and offered citizens something that has been systematically denied them in the past few years: the opportunity to express themselves without intermediaries, without party infrastructure and without promises. The campaign "Declare Victory", in which signatures of support for the request to call for extraordinary parliamentary elections were collected, had no ambition to be a formal legal initiative. Rather, it was a political experiment, an attempt to measure the mood in a country where the mood of citizens is usually measured through controlled polls and directed election processes, or simply by counting how many of us are at large street protests.
FROM TRAGEDY TO POLITICAL ARTICULATION
Everything that has happened in Serbia in the last 14 months is fundamentally new and unknown to us. The student movement that stood behind this action was not born from an ideological matrix, nor from a desire for political affirmation, but from a tragedy that exposed the systemic carelessness and corruption of the state leadership itself. The fall of the canopy at the Railway Station in Novi Sad, in which 16 people died, was the moment when the abstract story of corruption, bribery and institutional irresponsibility was given concrete names and irreversible consequences. The protests that followed were, at first, an expression of shock and sadness, but over time they turned into a persistent, organized rebellion against a system that refuses to take responsibility.
For months, the students insisted on a horizontal organization, rejecting leaders and political branding, aware that any personalization of the protest would be an easy target for discredit. However, as time passed, it became clear that moral superiority, however important, could not forever replace political articulation. The demand for extraordinary elections appeared as a logical continuation of the struggle, but also as the riskiest step up to that time because it implied entering the space that the government perceives as its exclusive territory.
STAND AS A CROSS-SECTION OF SOCIETY
The image of Serbia on December 28 was scattered, but at the same time astonishingly consistent. In Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš, Kragujevac, Subotica, Kraljevo, as well as in smaller towns, people approached the student stands with a certain distrust, but they stayed longer than they planned. Conversations were held that did not resemble political discussions but rather confessions, series of frustrations that have had no one to vent to for years.
"I don't trust anyone anymore, but I want to sign" - this sentence was uttered by a citizen in a TV survey.
It is precisely in this contradiction that the essence of the action lies: the signatures were not an expression of faith in the student organization, but an expression of deep distrust towards the existing political order. At the same time, the signatures were a reflection of the general feeling that this is the last chance to overthrow the repressive regime and that there may not be another. The students do not offer a program, they do not promise detailed but, for now, only principled though essential changes. They didn't present themselves as an alternative to the government, but they set themselves up as a means for change to happen. Maybe that's why they seemed more believable than anyone who does it regularly.
According to the data published by the students, about 400.000 signatures were collected in one day. The reaction of the authorities was quick and expected: disputing the number, relativizing the action and trying to reduce the whole event to statistical manipulation. The President of the Republic stated that the students did not collect "even seven percent" of the number they stated, thus opening another in a series of disputes about what constitutes the truth in Serbia.
However, insisting on the exact number serves as a convenient way to avoid the essential question. Even if the number is many times smaller, the fact remains that it is a massive, independently organized political action without institutional support, without a budget and without a media monopoly. In a country where political support has been manufactured for years through control, pressure and clientelistic networks, this was an attempt to measure support by trust.
Students are inconvenient political actors for the government precisely because they refuse to behave like political actors in the classical sense. They have no leaders that can be discredited, no biographies that can be compromised, no party structure that can be infiltrated. Their strength lies in their collectivity and in the fact that they are not yet politically spent.
For the opposition, the student movement presents an equally uncomfortable issue, as it shows how little trust is left in professional politics. The students succeeded in mobilizing people whom the opposition had been unable to bring to the streets for years, precisely because they were not looking for votes, but instead offered a space for the articulation of dissatisfaction.
PEACEFUL ACTION INSTEAD OF VIOLENT REACTION
On December 24 of last year, the High Court in Novi Sad suspended the proceedings and dropped the charges against several persons who were charged in connection with the fall of the canopy of the Railway Station in Novi Sad due to the lack of evidence for reasonable suspicion that they had committed criminal acts. According to the court's decision, there is no evidence that Goran Vesić, Jelena Tanasković, Anita Dimovski, Marija Gavrilović and Dejan Todorović contributed to this accident. The collateral good resulting from this decision is the acquittal of the professor of the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Novi Sad, Milan Spremić, who was really accused in the justice of God. The public reaction to the suspension of the setting was not stormy in the classic sense of the word. There were no mass gatherings on the same day, no dramatic press conferences, but that silence was the loudest indicator that the decision was not experienced as a surprise, but as a confirmation of what had been understood for months. Citizens have not expected justice from this system for a long time, and this was evident from the reaction to this news. After all, everything that happened with the indictment in the previous months led to its cancellation.
However, the cancellation of the indictment produced something perhaps more politically dangerous: a sense of finality, the impression that the institutional response to the tragedy was concluded without any meaningful clarification of responsibility. In that vacuum, four days later, the student campaign to collect signatures for the extraordinary parliamentary elections took on a meaning that goes beyond its formal purpose.
That's why the "Declare Victory" action cannot be interpreted separately from the decision to cancel the indictment, because it was that decision that exposed the ultimate limit of the occupation of the system. If it is not possible to establish responsibility even in a case that had clear consequences for human lives, then the demand for political change ceases to be abstract and becomes a matter of elementary social logic.
In the days between December 24 and 28, the students did not radicalize their rhetoric, nor did they explicitly use the indictment as a central motive for the action, but its absence from the legal system was strongly present in the public space. People approaching the booths were not talking about election regulations, but about the feeling that the institutions had exhausted their own credibility. The signing, in that sense, became a substitute for the institutional response that was absent.
The cancellation of the indictment acted as the last point in a series of messages that justice in Serbia has an expiration date, while the student action was an attempt to politically challenge that expiration date. The signatures collected by the students did not have legal force, but they had a clear symbolic function: to show that the issue of responsibility cannot be permanently closed by a court decision if society refuses to accept it as final.
Therefore, the student action was not a reaction in affect, but a rational response to the defeat of the institutions. Instead of protesting against a specific decision, the students offered a broader framework, moving the issue from the level of individual criminal responsibility to the level of political legitimacy. If the system could not process a tragedy, the message was clear that the problem was systemic, not an incident.
As expected, the government tried to separate these two events, treating the cancellation of the indictment as an exclusively legal issue, and the student action as a political performance without consequences. However, precisely in this impossibility of separation lies the essence of the problem. In a society where justice is persistently politicized, and abuse of politics is carried out by formal procedures and perverting the essence, students have shown that the border between these two fields can no longer be maintained.
Therefore, the students did not react to the court's decision, but to the message that that decision sent. And the message was simple: if justice has no continuation, politics becomes the only remaining space in which the question of responsibility can still be raised.
WHAT AFTER THE 28TH. DECEMBER
The "Declare Victory" action did not lead to immediate political change, nor did it have the ambition to do so. Her greatest value, like all the student moves so far, lies in the fact that she pierced the narrative of the complete apathy of society and showed that there is a critical mass of people who are ready to declare themselves, even when they know that their signature has no immediate institutional weight.
After December 28, the government can no longer claim that dissatisfaction is limited to a small number of citizens. At the same time, students are faced with a challenge that is perhaps greater than the action itself: how to preserve credibility and not become part of the political machinery they criticize.
In a country where political problems are often solved by pretending they don't exist, the students did something radically simple that day: they named a problem and tried to measure it. And speaking of naming, let's not ignore what those 400.000 citizens did. They stood behind the request for elections with their first and last name, address and phone number, and resolutely circled "yes" to the question of whether they wanted to be controllers in the elections.
photo: ognjen stevanović / fonet...
VUČIĆ'S FAIRY TALE AS A WEAPON IN SELF-DEFENSE
The statement of the President of Serbia regarding the student action to collect signatures was pitiful: "When I saw the number they mentioned, how many signatures they collected, I just smiled. No one will ever be able to and no one has ever collected that number. They did not collect even seven percent of the number they claim to have collected. We had insight into the number of people present at each of the 346 places, we know the exact number of people who attended. There were also our sympathizers who tore up and crossed out their papers."
At first glance, it seems like a routine challenge and accusation that students "exaggerate" their achievement, but on the second reading it turns into a series of claims that speak more about the authorities' self-confidence in their own rating than about the actual situation on the ground.
The president's smile, with which he begins this statement, functions as a rhetorical tool: it does not serve to diminish the significance of the figure, but to suggest that the very idea of mass, autonomous mobilization is a priori implausible. However, when the challenge is based on the claim that the government has "accurate insight" into the number of attendees at hundreds of locations throughout the country, the question is not how the students counted, but how the government counted, who counted, on what basis and with what powers.
The claim about "the exact number of people who joined" was left without any explanation of the methodology, but it was made with an authority that is not proven but implied. And frankly, Vučić's "I" has been a symptom of impotence and disturbed self-control for a long time. In his twisted logic, truth is not what can be verified, but what comes from a position of power, albeit a very questionable power. He no longer casts doubt only on official data, but on every single signature, every signed slip, and the proof of the inauthenticity of the data is just that he says so.
A particularly indicative part of the statement refers to "our sympathizers who tore up and crossed out the papers". Vučić does not present it as a problem, but almost as a technical detail. By doing so, perhaps unintentionally, he acknowledges not only the presence of the government on the ground, but also its active interference in civil action, with the implicit message that such behavior is legitimate as long as it comes from his side, i.e. their sides.
In an attempt to dispute the number of signatures, Vučić opened a question that is far more difficult: if students are really insignificant, why was it necessary to monitor, count, relativize and disturb them. Because the government that is sure of its support does not have to prove that other people's numbers are impossible. It is enough to call the elections.
