Serbia votes in election pitting longtime leader against student movement
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Serbians have begun voting in parliamentary elections amid a mass student protest movement that seeks to oust longtime populist leader Aleksandar Vucic, who has held power as prime minister and then president for more than a decade.
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The snap elections, called by Vucic in September, follow almost two years of student-led demonstrations against perceived corruption and creeping authoritarianism, triggered by the deaths of 16 people when a train station canopy collapsed in the city of Novi Sad in 2024.
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The students have since gained widespread support.
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A loss for Vucic would mark a profound political shift in the Balkan country of some 6 million people, reminiscent of the defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orban in April.
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But Vucic, who resigned as president in September to run again for prime minister, is a strong incumbent. Many voters thank him for pulling Serbia out of economic obscurity and orchestrating a period of sustained modernisation.
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During the campaign, Vucic has promised higher pensions and public sector salaries, investment in state healthcare, and subsidies for young couples. He has balanced closer ties with China, a major investor, and Russia, Serbia’s traditional ally and principal supplier of natural gas, while leaving the door open to joining the European Union.
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But relations with the EU have frayed under his leadership, with the bloc growing increasingly frustrated over a lack of reforms addressing the judiciary, the rule of law and corruption.
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The Student List movement’s agenda focuses on rooting out corruption and improving schooling, while saying little about their international ambitions.
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Their roster of 250 largely unfamiliar candidates, including university professors, actors and farmers, is led by cardiologist Ilija Srdanovic.
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Their campaign is more about ending graft, restoring the rule of law and rebuilding institutions than divisive issues such as Russia, EU membership or normalizing relations with Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, says Jelena Vasiljevic, a senior research associate at the University of Belgrade’s Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory.
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“The political dynamic has changed from the ground up,” she told Al Jazeera.
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Young people, long considered the country’s most politically disengaged group, have become the core of its largest social mobilisation in decades, she said.
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Vasiljevic also said that turnout will be decisive.
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Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) retains a disciplined core electorate, supported by a clientelist model of government in which goods and services are exchanged for political support, she said. The Student List must not only unite opposition-minded voters but also mobilise habitual non-voters and the undecided.
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Opinion polls are predicting a tight race.
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An Ipsos poll published on Thursday gives the SNS 47 percent of the vote to the students’ 40 percent, though other polls have put the students ahead.
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Rights groups and activists say repression has worsened since the deadly train station canopy collapse, which was widely blamed on government corruption and sparked the student demonstrations.
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About 150,000 supporters of the student movement rallied in central Belgrade on Thursday.
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Vucic and his party have repeatedly denied accusations of repression, corruption and spying on their opponents.
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The former president claims the students are funded by foreign agents in Croatia and Montenegro, a charge the students deny.
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Polling stations opened Sunday at 7am (06:00 GMT) and close at 8pm (19:00 GMT) with first indications of results expected around two hours later.
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