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Serbia will hold snap parliamentary elections on October 25, President Aleksandar Vucic announced Tuesday, bowing to nearly a year of pressure from a student-led protest movement that has convulsed the country since a deadly infrastructure collapse last November.
Vucic told state broadcaster RTS he would sign a decree Wednesday dissolving parliament and formally calling the vote. "Elections will be held in Serbia on October 25," he said, adding that he believed the country would "finally emerge from this crisis" once voters had their say.
The announcement caps months of upheaval that began in November 2024, when a canopy at a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed, killing 16 people.
The disaster set off sustained demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of Serbians, led by university students who argued the collapse was a direct consequence of corruption they say pervades the Balkan nation's institutions, particularly in infrastructure and construction.
The unrest has posed the most serious sustained challenge to Vucic's rule in his decade-plus grip on power.
What began as calls for a transparent investigation into the canopy collapse gradually hardened into a broader demand: snap parliamentary elections, something Vucic had promised on multiple occasions without setting a date until now.
While the movement's momentum has ebbed somewhat in recent months, student organizers have said they intend to field their own list of candidates in the October vote, formalizing their shift from street protest to electoral politics.
Vucic, 56, is a longtime nationalist politician who has controlled Serbia's government for more than ten years, cycling through the roles of prime minister and president. He was first elected president in 2017 and won a second five-year term in 2022.
He has indicated he plans to step down from the presidency immediately after formally calling the election so he can campaign, a move widely seen as a signal of his intention to return to the premiership.
Serbia has been pursuing membership in the European Union for years, a process that requires candidate countries to demonstrate progress on rule-of-law and anti-corruption benchmarks.
The protest movement's allegations of graft have added a layer of scrutiny to that bid, though the scope of any effect on accession talks was not addressed in Vucic's remarks.
With the decree expected Wednesday, the formal election campaign period will begin, setting up a vote that will test whether the protest movement can translate street mobilization into ballot-box results, and whether Vucic can secure the mandate he says is needed to resolve the country's political crisis.
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