Student-backed election winners demand sweeping resignations in Serbia

Serbia's victorious student-led movement has called for top figures in the police, intelligence and judiciary to stand down, days after ousting ex-president Aleksandar Vučić's party from power.

Standing in Pioneers' Park opposite parliament, newly elected MPs on the Student List demanded the immediate dismissal of all police officers who had broken the law, singling out the heads of the police, the BIA security agency and anti-terror unit.

It is not often a European country votes to fully reset its political system overnight, and Serbians have voted to hand the task to a group of novice politicians, made up of intellectuals, professors, artists, athletes and as many as 12 medical doctors and surgeons.

But the handover of power will take weeks, and the students' movement is concerned that evidence of possible wrongdoing could be destroyed in that time.

Just a few days ago, the park they were standing in on Thursday was a tent camp, filled with Vučić loyalists outside his office.

Within hours of him admitting defeat on Sunday night, the camp was dismantled, and a team of volunteers moved in on Monday morning to clean up the mess.

"This is just the first wave of spring cleaning, the new ones are coming now - we are very excited but ready to do it too," said Marija Milovanović, 25, as she scrubbed a park bench.

The student movement emerged from protests following the fatal collapse of a railway station canopy that killed 16 people in November 2024, in Serbia's second largest town Novi Sad.

Their desire was to bring those responsible to justice, and investigate widespread corruption claims blamed for one of the most tragic events in Serbia's modern history.

They have made some bold promises.

Under their Student Plan, they promise to "halt the plunder, return stolen goods to the state budget, and invest directly in education and the economy".

The purge of Vučić loyalists has already begun at Serbia's state broadcaster RTS, where director Manja Grčić has stepped down.

Newly elected MP Mirjana Nikolić said Serbian citizens had the right to truthful information and RTS had served the interests of the government for years.

The new MPs have also set their sights on replacing the head of Telekom Srbija, Vladimir Lučić.

Vučić loyalist Ana Brnabić, who is currently Serbia's acting president, has accused her opponents of choosing "revolutionary justice, not rule of law," and of aiming to shut down "all of the media they dislike".

But one of the next government's best-known MPs, Dejan Šoškić, argues that key reforms need to be in place fast.

"In the first six months, I would like to see the media scene liberated, fighting against corruption on the way, the institutions operating as prescribed by laws and a lustration law introduced," said Šoškić, an economist who served as governor of the central bank between 2010 and 2012.

By lustration, he means banning from public office members of the Vučić government or party apparatus who are found to have violated the rights of Serbians.

That kind of purge will take time, as all of Serbia's main pillars of authority have been held by Vučić and his party for so long, warns Strahinja Subotić of Belgrade-based European Policy Centre.

Ultimately, he believes the new administration will have to "build bridges to the segments that have been operating well in the past".

All 141 successful candidates were chosen by students from universities across Serbia through a lengthy, secretive and carefully crafted process, and tasked with implementing the movement's plan for a complete rebuild of the country.

That political agenda took months for a highly diverse group of students to agree to. Now it is up to the equally disparate team of successful candidates to put the plan into practice, rather than the students themselves.

Another prominent figure on the Student List, is Radomir Saičić, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Belgrade.

"While the practical mechanisms will be developed on the go, the new MPs will stick to the students' 1200-page long and detailed plan," he told the BBC.

"Parliament is making decisions, but since this change was led by students' efforts, we would highly value their opinion and work closely with them," he promised.

Not only are they newcomers to politics, but Serbia's election winners have no obvious leader and are faced with a series of complex challenges, including taking on the country's highly complex balancing act on the international stage.

Serbia is both a candidate to join the European Union and maintains close relations with Russia. Its bid to join the bloc has long been on the back-burner, while its Western Balkan neighbours press ahead.

The EU was quick to welcome the Student List victory and has promised to back their push for reforms to the rule of law, media freedom and fight against corruption.

But EU integration occupies a strikingly minor place in the students' election manifesto, which describes the bloc merely as Serbia's "most important economic partner".

For years, Belgrade has balanced its foreign policy between the EU and its eastern partners, Russia and China. Belgrade has managed to stand out in Europe by not imposing sanctions on Moscow since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In return, Serbia has been rewarded with preferential gas prices that have helped maintain domestic stability, and Vladimir Putin publicly endorsed Vučić's bid to remain in power.

That does not mean that the students have any plans to change course, and changing Serbia's foreign policy may not be high on their list.

"Serbia had it own experience with sanctions in the 1990s and we know that they mostly harm ordinary people and do not affect policies of a state," said Dejan Šoškić, referring to UN sanctions imposed during the wars in former Yugoslavia.

The new government's initial focus will most likely be on domestic reform, and the clock is already ticking before the next election campaign, with presidential elections due to take place in December.

Aleksandar Vučić is legally barred from running for a third term as president, but he has promised that his defeated Serbian Progressive Party will fight back: "We will beat them much faster than they can even imagine."