What European students can learn from their Serbian peers

While Europe was asleep over the past two years, Serbia was wide awake. A nationwide student movement shook the foundations of a deeply entrenched government and on Sunday, it dealt it an unprecedented electoral blow – something opposition parties had failed to do for more than a decade.Until the election results came out, the Serbian student movement was largely ignored by international media. The students were seen as naive, irrelevant, disaffected youth.That they were underestimated by the world and by President Aleksandar Vucic was perhaps to their advantage. But Serbian students did not just rely on their opponent’s overconfidence. For almost two years, they built and practised an alternative model of politics that soon became visible and eventually triumphed at the polls.Although the student protests were triggered by one particular incident – the death of 16 people in a train canopy collapse at a newly renovated station in 2024 – their anger had much deeper roots.Students and their families had been squeezed from all sides: by local elites whose corruption and mismanagement eroded the standard of living and plunged them into precarity; and by international corporations, whic...