It is three days before the fateful elections in Serbia that will literally decide whether hundreds of thousands of young people will be leaving this country, or whether we will manage to fight for them to get a chance to live their lives in their homeland.
In a few days, we will know whether the Student List put together for the elections will get a chance to form a government or not. We will also see what kinds of tricks the incumbent criminal regime will try to use to change and/or contest the election results.
But there are a number of reasons why I claim that the students have already won.
Equality – non-hierarchical structure of the organisation
They have achieved what numerous pundits and reporters had discounted as impossible. They first built a resistance movement and then a political movement that has laid bare all the violence, corruption and injustice that put and kept Serbia’s regime in power, and all without having to establish a hierarchical structure with a single charismatic leader. And all of it with the regime having overwhelming media power and abusing it to spread the kinds of lies and slander that had broken political opponents in the past.
Nonviolence, creativity, self-sacrifice
Despite numerous attacks, provocations and set-ups, the student movement has remained staunchly nonviolent, rejecting violence as a method against the violent and corrupt regime.
Withstanding overwhelming repression by the authorities that were making use of all available state resources, the student movement started and grew through direct basic democracy, creating decision-making systems that excluded hierarchical structures and interest groups. There have been and continue to be conflicts of opinion and ideological stratification within the movement, a struggle for influence by subgroups, but the movement has survived on a wave of incredible enthusiasm, creativity and a set of diverse activities that left room for everyone to join, contribute, feel useful to the community and feel the power of solidarity and compassion. The symbolism of self-sacrifice in the marches that saw them traverse hundreds of kilometres, bicycle tours of thousands of kilometres, actions that put “a student in every village” where they constantly encountered threats and attacks from the regime has made the movement as strong as granite. When asked about being tired, they would answer, “No one is tired.”
Solidarity
Ordinary citizens helping the movement often found themselves targeted by groups of thugs who destroyed property vital for their livelihoods with impunity, demolishing local cafes, buses, flower shops, boutiques, just because the owners dared to publicly support the student movement. Students were run over by cars, beaten with baseball bats, tortured, threatened with sexual violence by the police, minors were callously beaten by the police. People working in the public sector, in education, were summarily laid off for supporting the protests of their students.
It is hard to even enumerate all the situations of violence to which they were exposed.
But the response was solidarity. Clever and capable allies from the IT sector devised a system for a solidarity network and called on people to join and donate money each month for those who lost their jobs. Ad hoc actions raised funds for ransacked flower shops and destroyed buses. Whenever the regime tried to destroy, people came together in solidarity to provide support. Like stories from the war, when at a time of cruelty and scarcity, people helped strangers as if they were family, because injustice had joined our fates into one common fate. Like the scenes of elderly people along the villages on the student march route bringing out a sack of apples to offer because it was probably all they had.
And tears, tears, tears, lot of tears.
Compassion
When students from Novi Pazar, predominantly Bosniaks, were attacked for joining the faculty blockades, the response again was connection and solidarity. They trampled all the barriers set up between them by nationalist narratives over the decades and embraced each other. Invincible youth as an unexpected force setting things in their proper place. Love, solidarity and a common struggle for justice forged them and brought them together.
A Miracle
For me, all of this, growing in the land of Serbia that for the past 40 years has been beset by nationalism, wars, hatred, violence, corruption, poverty, nepotism, schools with no toilets, hospitals lacking basic equipment, churches ordered by the government to refuse shelter to young people, jobs given to the obedient instead of the capable and honest, false dreams of military victories and our own glory, the mocking of parents of killed workers seeking justice, police officers losing their jobs when they uncover crimes, reconstructed canopies killing people, lists of pardons that are kept secret… for me, in the midst of all this, it seems like a miracle that I cannot explain, except partially by seeing them as children of parents who 26 years ago took down a similarly malignant government that had left tens of thousands of dead to haunt us in the decades to come unless we face up to this fact honestly and justly.
We have won because the students have won, whatever the results of the vote count on Sunday, 25 October 2026.
No one can take away our victory. It was worth fighting for and living to see the day.