BELGRADE, Serbia -- Serbia's Gen Z student movement pulled off what the country's opposition parties couldn't in 14 years: ousting one of Europe's most entrenched populist and authoritarian leaders.
But after sweeping last month's parliamentary election, with around 53% of the vote, and ending Aleksandar Vucic's grip on power, now comes the hard part. Can a movement built to resist power govern?
"When you solve a problem, another three show up," said cultural-studies graduate student Tara Blagojevic walking across Belgrade's Slavija Square, a focal point of protests against Vucic. "We solved one problem. Now we have other problems."
The students won't take a single seat in parliament. Instead, they have handpicked an unlikely cast of mostly political outsiders to represent them, including a cardiologist, a former central-bank governor, a basketball legend and an opera singer.
Joining them are dozens of academics more accustomed to lecture halls than the corridors of power. Most have never held political office.
The student movement has yet to choose a prime minister, much less assemble a cabinet or even decide how it can influence the lawmakers it propelled into office. It must also find a way to keep united its politically diverse bloc, which includes nationalists, liberals and leftists.
"What we lack in experience, we will make up for in integrity," said Katarina Scepanovic, a high-school English teacher elected on the student slate. "We are figuring things out as we go along."
Serbia's Gen Z-led political upheaval matters far beyond the Balkans. It tests whether youth movements can turn protest into electoral victory and then build governments that work.
Across Europe, tens of thousands joined Gen Z-led protests in Germany on Saturday, while student demonstrations in France have grown into a broader movement over education and living costs.
Elsewhere, youth-led uprisings in recent years have shaken political establishments, fueled by anger over corruption, deep distrust of political elites and the organizing power of social media. In Bangladesh, students helped topple a prime minister, only for an established party to win the subsequent election. In Nepal, a newer party swept to power after Gen Z protests. In Madagascar, the military took over following a revolt.
The Serbian student movement can bring positive change for the country but "will face enormous challenges, including meeting their electorate's expectations, maintaining the movement's cohesion and forming a government while maintaining their collective approach as far as possible," said Michael Davenport, former European Union and U.K. ambassador to Serbia. "They will be tested on all fronts."
The upheaval offers Serbia, a Balkan nation of some 6.5 million long pulled between the EU and Russia, a chance to rebuild its democratic institutions and revive its stalled ambitions to join the EU.
But the victory doesn't necessarily herald a geopolitical realignment. The students have opposed sanctions against Moscow, citing Serbia's dependence on Russian gas and memories of sanctions against their own country in the 1990s. The movement also maintains that Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008, remains part of Serbia.
Student-backed candidates have proposed an eventual referendum on Serbia's EU membership, though it isn't part of the movement's formal election platform. Blagojevic said the new government would put EU democratic standards into practice.
The students hadn't initially set out to take power. They wanted answers about a tragic incident.
On Nov. 1, 2024, a canopy collapsed at the newly renovated train station in Serbia's second city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people. For many Serbians, it became a symbol of alleged corruption and a state that had failed to protect its citizens.
Students demanded investigations and accountability, occupied universities and organized silent vigils across the country. A mass rally centered on Belgrade's Slavija Square in March 2025 drew hundreds of thousands in one of the largest protests in modern Serbian history.
The anger ran deeper than the train station incident. Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party had governed since 2012, while he dominated politics as prime minister and then president. Critics have accused his administration of pressuring the judiciary and controlling much of the media. His government has denied the accusations, portraying the protests as a threat to stability. Representatives of his party didn't respond to a request for comment for this article.
Dejan Soskic, a former central-bank governor on the student-backed slate, described being vilified by pro-government media for criticizing economic policy. He said the protests were about making institutions work again, not simply replacing one set of politicians with another.
"This is not the time for classical politics," he said at the University of Belgrade's economics faculty as students streamed through the halls toward morning lectures. "Classical politics comes once you re-establish the normal and proper functioning of the country."
For Blagojevic, political protest runs in the family. She recalled that her grandmother protested as a dentistry student in 1968 and her aunt, an architecture student, took part in demonstrations in the 1990s.
Blagojevic joined students organizing through plenums, open assemblies at university faculties where participants debated and voted. Representatives chosen by those assemblies coordinated protests, media strategy and eventually the election campaign through working groups and Telegram and Signal chats.
Luka Maksic, a 23-year-old student at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Organizational Sciences, joined a campus blockade in December 2024 at a friend's urging. Some 800 fellow students had gathered. The sight lit "a flame in me," he said.
Two months later, he joined a two-day student march to Novi Sad. As the marchers entered the city, songs blared from apartment windows, fireworks lit the streets and crowds cheered.
"It was a matter of time before this government went down," Maksic recalled thinking.
In May 2025, convinced street pressure alone wouldn't deliver change, the students demanded snap elections. They fanned out across towns and villages, gathered signatures and recruited polling-station monitors. Their decentralized assemblies made it difficult for the government to target a single leader or cut a deal to stop the campaign.
But that same structure now presents a dilemma.
Maksic said putting students on the ballot risked pitting them against one another and splintering a movement built without leaders. "The opportunity for students to go into parliament would create a sort of battle royal between them," he said.
There was also a more pragmatic consideration: winning votes.
"It is one thing to support students who are protesting in the streets and marching across Serbia, and quite another to actually vote for a group of 18- to 22-year-olds to govern the country," said Aleksandar Ivkovic, a Belgrade-based political analyst.
So the students selected 250 candidates -- largely teachers, academics and other professionals with expertise they trusted. Once elected, however, the new lawmakers answer to voters and the constitution, not to student assemblies.
"We cannot directly influence their decisions daily," said Blagojevic. "But we are definitely not going to disappear."
The students' election platform promises independent prosecutors, more-transparent public contracts, depoliticized state agencies and freer media. Following the election, the head of Serbia's national public broadcaster resigned, while a presenter at a regional public station apologized on air for years of one-sided coverage. "We turned a blind eye," the presenter told viewers. "The right questions were not asked."
But reforming the judiciary, prosecution service and regulatory agencies might prove harder. Many are overseen by bodies populated with Vucic-aligned appointees, according to political-risk consulting firm Teneo. Scepanovic, the English teacher, expects fierce obstruction "from inside" the bureaucracy. Vucic's alliance is projected to hold about 100 seats.
Ultimately, the new coalition will be judged not just by the institutions it reforms, but also by the opportunities it creates for the young Serbians who brought it to power. Youth unemployment stood at 22% in the second quarter, compared with an overall rate of 7.2%, according to official statistics.
Over gurmanska pljeskavica -- a traditional Serbian grilled patty mixed with cheese and spices -- at his favorite Belgrade spot, Maksic offered a simpler measure of victory for someone who helped bring down a strongman.
"I want to live in Serbia," he said. "I want many people like me to stay here."