After a year of student-led protests, cracks in the Serbian government have turned into fissures Srdjan Cvejic
HeyOn 1 November 2024, a concrete canopy collapsed at the railway station in Novi Sad, the second largest city in Serbia, killing 16 people. The tragedy sparked the longest wave of protests the country has seen in a decade – a spontaneous uprising against corruption, neglect and the arrogance of power. A year later, cracks in Serbia’s concrete have turned into cracks in its political foundations.
The disaster cut deep for two reasons.
Firstly, every Serb has a story about that station. Built in 1964 and rebuilt in recent years to serve the new high-speed line between Belgrade and the Hungarian border, Novi Sad Station has long been a meeting place in the north of the country – a place where families and friends say hello or say goodbye. Just a week before the collapse, I had left my wife and daughters waiting in its shade to buy water and snacks from a nearby kiosk. What happened to these 16 victims could have happened to any of us.
Second, infrastructure is a source of pride for the regime and its propaganda. For more than a decade, President Aleksandar Vucic’s ruling party has measured its success by kilometers of asphalt and tracks. Each election campaign features new promises about roads, bridges and tunnels. Coming Expo 2027 In Belgrade is the Government Gallery. But at Vucic’s speed in Serbia, patronage and political gain are seen as coming before safety or oversight.
For example, Novi Sad station was ceremonially opened twice, in 2022 and again in 2024. The most notable reopening took place in March 2022 during the election campaigns in Serbia and Hungary: Viktor Orbán and Vucic stood side by side, a fitting pair of two leaders whose regimes seemed to compete only in their control of the media, their disdain for institutions, and their courtship of Moscow.
This summer, Vucic opened another section of the highway even though part of it lacked a proper permit and the tunnel was not equipped with automatic safety monitoring. The government’s solution was to suspend tunnel safety rules and place emergency crews around the clock – firefighters, police and ambulances – at the entrance to the tunnels.
The fall of the umbrella did not create a crisis in Serbia. Expose it. Over the past twelve years, the regime has seized control of every institution, painfully hollowing out the democracy built between 2000 and 2012. With the courts, media and regulatory bodies under party control, the street remains the only public forum. Since 2016, Serbia has witnessed near-annual waves of protest – each one a training ground for the next generation of protesters.
Since the massive Belgrade protests on June 28, the regime has dropped all its masks. During regular protests across the country, police beat and chased peaceful protesters through the streets; Nearly a thousand citizens They were arrested Since the uprising began. The state no longer hides its fears, but rather practices them.
Vucic’s government likes to appear to be sitting on several geopolitical chairs, balanced between East and West, but in reality it is running the country for the president, taking money from Brussels and Europe. Orders from Moscow. The weaker Vucic’s party becomes in the polls, the more it relies on its core support, which is largely pro-Russian, nationalist and right-wing – and the more it leans toward Moscow. Such an ungovernable balance carries with it the risk of instability spreading to the rest of the Western Balkans.
Russia’s grip on Serbia’s security services remains dangerously underestimated. Its intelligence networks move with impunity from suspected training camps It was detected on Serbian territory – Where agents practiced chaos in preparation for election day in Moldova – To the corridors of institutions in Belgrade. Meanwhile, the so-called “anti-protest movement” – a motley crew of Hired thugs loyal to the regime – borrows directly from the Kremlin’s playbook, a Serbian version of anti-Maidan in Ukraine.
By late 2024, even before the parachute fell, the public mood had changed decisively. A National poll In September 2024, he found more Serbs saying the country was Moving in the wrong direction (47%) than the correct one (46%). Since then, disappointment has deepened, reaching 53% versus 36%. Inflation remains above the EU average, wages lag behind costs, and debt remains staggering, although no longer setting new records. In response to the protests, Belgrade’s city council made public transportation free – a gesture emblematic of a broader trend of governing as if the state’s resources would never run out, in a capital that was virtually bankrupt last year.
Vucic’s Serbia now resembles a government Ponzi scheme: borrowing legitimacy through spectacle and simultaneously postponing collapse. US sanctions on the Russian-owned Serbian oil industry (NIS), which took effect on October 9, 2025, threaten the country’s energy stability and its entire re-industrial growth model built on cheap Russian gas. The government’s ad hoc response only confirms the absence of any coherent policy.
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After months of student-led protests, Serbia has become almost ungovernable – suspended between ever-increasing repression and renewal. Western diplomats are still hoping for calm: the European Union prefers not to rock the Balkan boat while the war rages in Ukraine and Moscow raises hybrid threats. But Serbia cannot return.
Ahead of the November 1 anniversary protests, there are several possible paths, but one thing is clear – the pre-Umbrella status quo is gone forever. Neither civil society, nor the opposition, nor students will return to the theatrical “dialogues” that took place in politics before.
Students in Serbia have joined the global front of defiance of Generation Z. Their refusal to remain silent in the face of corruption and impunity shows that democratic renewal may once again come from the streets, and from the youth.
A year later, the regime that dropped the parachute that killed 16 people is still in place. The protests began out of sadness, but now they continue with a spirit of endurance. What Serbia has built in 12 months is not a new station, but a new awareness – that the stability under Vucic was never real. It was always borrowed time, a peace contingent on the coming collapse.