BELGRADE, Serbia — Aleksandar Vučić has admitted defeat in Serbia’s snap parliamentary election to a student-led protest movement, ending his Serbian Progressive Party’s run in power since 2012.
“It is clear we have lost these elections,” Vučić told supporters at party headquarters. With 97% of polling stations counted, the election commission said the Student List had 52.6% of the vote to the SNS’s 39.2%, BBC News reported.
Vučić said the students would hold between 135 and 140 of the 250 seats in parliament, against about 105 for his party. Pollsters put turnout at 67.6%, the highest since 1992, The Guardian reported.
Crowds celebrated in Belgrade, Novi Sad and other cities with chanting, car horns and fireworks. “This will be a free state,” said the Student List’s lead candidate, Ilija Srdanović.
The movement formed less than two years ago after the November 2024 collapse of a canopy at Novi Sad railway station killed 16 people, a disaster blamed on corruption and negligence. It ran on pledges to purge officials who cracked down on protesters and to free the public broadcaster from political control. Vučić and the SNS have denied corruption.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he hoped the “new political force” would see that ties with Moscow were in Serbia’s interest. Hungary’s prime minister, Péter Magyar, welcomed the result.
Sources: BBC News, The Guardian
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