Serbia’s Student List Holds Final Rally Before Parliamentary Vote

The rally marked the latest stage in a protest movement that has continued for about two years. Student List is described as a leaderless organization of student-backed candidates seeking to challenge or oust Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party, known as the SNS. Several reports presented the election as a significant challenge to Vučić’s political power and to the ruling party.

The vote was scheduled for Sunday, October 25. The campaign therefore moved directly from sustained street mobilization into an attempt to gain parliamentary representation, making the Belgrade gathering both a closing campaign event and a demonstration of the movement’s support before voting began.

Attendance figures remain unresolved. The Guardian and The Japan Times reported approximately 150,000 people at the rally, but Al Jazeera described thousands of participants, while Deutsche Welle and Tagesschau used the broader description of tens of thousands. The available reports therefore establish a very large gathering but do not provide an independently verified final count.

The Guardian described the protests and the Student List campaign as originating in anger over the deadly collapse of a railway station in Novi Sad. That account links the movement’s electoral challenge to the grievances that first drove the demonstrations, although the supplied evidence for that origin comes from that Guardian report alone.

The movement’s structure distinguishes it from a conventional party campaign in the supplied reporting. Student List is characterized as leaderless and built around student-backed candidates, while its stated political objective is to challenge or remove the SNS from power. The reports describe this as a direct contest with Vučić and his ruling party rather than simply another opposition rally.

The final rally also underscored the scale of the transition the movement was attempting: after about two years of protests, it was seeking to turn public mobilization into participation in a parliamentary election. BBC World, RFI, Deutsche Welle and POLITICO Europe all described the protest period as lasting roughly two years, while multiple reports characterized the resulting electoral contest as a serious test for Vučić’s power.

What the supplied reports establish is the pre-election challenge, not its outcome. They document the final Belgrade rally, the movement’s organization and its effort to confront the SNS in the October 25 vote. They do not establish the election result or whether Student List entered government.