Serbian leader Aleksandar Vučić concedes defeat in fiercely contested parliamentary election

Speaking on Sunday, Vučić cited preliminary results showing the student-backed protest movement surging ahead. "Based on a stratified sample, it is clear that we lost these elections," Vučić told supporters at his party headquarters in Belgrade.

Record Turnout Fuels Change

The admission of defeat came after a record number of voters turned out to cast their ballot on Sunday. Across the country, long lines snaked out of polling stations, with some reporting wait times of up to two hours. By 7pm local time, pollsters and monitors CeSID and Ipsos put the turnout at 67.6%, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992.

The high turnout, along with the estimated 150,000 people who flocked to the students' final pre-election rally last week in Belgrade, fuelled early speculation that the students may have rallied enough support to bring an end to Vučić's 12 years in power.

Protests to Political Power

The high-stakes election in the EU-candidate country traces back to November 2024, when a concrete canopy collapsed at the Novi Sad railway station, killing 16 people. The tragedy set off protests among students, snowballing into a broad anti-government movement as evidence suggested that slipshod construction, fraud and corruption were to blame for the roof collapse.

As Vučić, the increasingly authoritarian leader who has dominated Serbian politics for more than a decade, grappled with mounting pressure from the students, he resigned the presidency last month to gamble on snap elections.

Uneven Campaign Landscape

The students seized on the chance to transform the movement into political power. They announced a slate of 250 candidates for the 250-seat parliament, ranging from academics to athletes and farmers, as they called on voters to back their push to rebuild Serbia's economy and restore its democracy.

The campaign pitted them against the political monolith of Vučić's SNS party, leaving in an uphill battle against a ruling party that had taken over almost all of the broadcast channels and which wielded ministries and other state institutions as political tools.

In the lead-up to Sunday's vote, both international and local election monitors expressed concerns about detentions and reports of surveillance and cyber-attacks against activists. On Sunday, independent monitoring groups warned of recorded cases of photographing of ballots that suggested pressure on voters, attempted vote-buying and carousel voting.

Among them was Raša Nedeljkov of the election monitory CRTA, who said that "a large number of irregularities continue to be recorded, while violent incidents outside polling stations are also becoming increasingly frequent." The results will be watched across the world as part of 10 pivotal days of elections across the globe in which the authoritarian right is facing off against pro-democracy forces.