It’s been six months since the canopy outside a newly renovated rail station in Novi Sad killed 16 people, and students mobilized to protest Aleksandr Vučić and his ruling SNS party. Demonstrations continue as a widening movement demands an accounting and change to end endemic corruption.
Might it yet threaten Vučić’s hold on power? Or cause reforms to challenge longstanding government policies that have made Serbia profoundly corrupt and seen worsening grift in recent years? Perhaps, but the European Union (EU) needs to demonstrate its central role in the process.
There are positive signals here. EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos said ahead of her April 30 trip to the country: “What we are looking for is very close to what the people [protesting] on the streets in Serbia are looking for.” Without significant democratic reforms, Serbia will not advance toward bloc membership, she said.
The level of popular anger about a single, albeit singular, tragedy may seem surprising to outsiders, but for Serbians it feels emblematic of a wider problem. The country’s ruling class are blamed for looking after themselves at the expense of the people, for example by channeling lucrative government-funded contracts to friends and associates who then fail to properly complete the work. A local authority statement four months before the disaster heralding Novi Sad station’s reconstruction as meeting “European standards” later appeared a sign of cynical indifference.
The station, funded by a Chinese-Serbia partnership as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), proved a breaking point after years of authoritarian-style rule and government corruption. Protests swelled to include taxi drivers, farmers, and lawyers — on March 15, demonstrators gathered in Belgrade for the largest protest in decades, with estimates of more than 300,000 attendees.
The anger is largely focused among young people. Whether Vučić will listen or ignore these calls — like he has before — is another question. But it is clear that the EU can no longer afford to look away. For Brussels, this is not just about Serbia: it is a test of whether the bloc is serious about defending democratic norms in its neighborhood and is capable of seeing it through.
After weeks of blockade protests, Vučić announced in December that Serbia’s government would release all documentation regarding the rail station construction project and that detained students would be released, claiming to have addressed the protestors’ demands. In a further effort to appease protestors, Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned in March, dissolving the government.
Despite these supposed concessions, the protests have continued, but the endgame is still unclear. One would expect opposition movements to rise and take advantage of this situation, but this has not happened. The country’s opposition parties are a disparate group ranging from pro-democracy groups to the far-right, united more by their rejection of the current regime than by a coherent vision for the country’s future.
With elections still two years away, Vučić is betting he can outlast the street protests, just as he has in the past. Unless a credible opposition movement emerges — or external pressure mounts — he may well succeed. During previous mass protests, he simply engineered artificial concessions to appease basic demands while waiting for protest fatigue to kick in. The end result is that nothing changes for good while the regime becomes increasingly authoritarian.
Serbia’s opposition parties have faced years of oppression at the hands of Vučić and his authorities, including widescale media control. This has resulted in a lack of cohesive leadership or organizational structures that can effectively establish a unified political platform and, more importantly, channel the energy of the protests into a coherent opposition movement.
In addition, the image of party politics as a whole has long been tainted in Serbia, a distrust that can be traced back to the days of Yugoslavia. In the eyes of many demonstrators, all politicians, whether SNS or opposition, are deeply corrupt. The opposition parties’ history of allowing personal interests to undermine the development of any effective resistance has only supported this notion.
With elections coming in 2027, there is still a way to go for the protestors and any opposition figures that could potentially enter the scene. Regardless, any challenger to Vučić will likely face a dangerous and rigged race unless the EU pressures him to respect the people’s will.
The EU and the US have been the main stabilizing forces in the post-war Balkans order since the 1990s, but given the administration’s ties to Serbia’s ruling class and a greater policy detachment from Europe, it is likely the EU will carry the main weight. Following months of protests and a meeting with Vučić, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen only broke the EU’s silence late March with a post stating Serbia’s need to follow through on EU reforms.
Over the years, the EU has tended to overlook the Vučić government’s behavior and placed greater emphasis on its role in regional stability. This approach is partly responsible for just 40% of Serbians desiring a future inside the EU – the lowest backing in the Balkans and only half the 80%-plus rating in Georgia.
Unlike Tbilisi or Chișinău, where EU flags are a centerpiece of anti-government protests, they are rarely seen at Belgrade demonstrations. Even so, Serbian students understand the bloc’s potential. The Tour de Strasbourg saw students biking from Novi Sad to the European Parliament in April to pressure for a strong EU response.
The Enlargement Commissioner’s April 29 statement (referred to above) may be the first signal of a new approach.
First, the EU should acknowledge and denounce the Vučić regime’s failures in the Novi Sad collapse and its treatment of the protestors. And secondly, the EU must start punishing Belgrade for violations of EU-required reforms. The EU is still Serbia’s main trading partner, and using this economic power as leverage would be an effective tool.
The risks are real. Vučić has spent years tightening his control over Serbia’s political and security apparatus and will not cede power easily. Regional escalation is a possibility.
Yet it is already clear that Vučić’s strategy of fueling instability — from Kosovo to Bosnia and Herzegovina — poses a greater long-term threat to regional peace than confronting his authoritarianism now. As the students have said: “We demand only the right to live freely-without fear, censorship, or repression,” values the EU categorically defends.
So long as the protests continue and this momentum grows, the EU has a unique opportunity to repair its institutional legitimacy in the Balkans.
Alba Alizoti is a fourth-year student at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and a former intern with the Democratic Resilience program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Dr. Leon Hartwell is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at CEPA and a Senior Associate at LSE IDEAS, London School of Economics.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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