Originally published in Heatwave Magazine Issue #2.
In “Pumping Up the Revolt: The Serbian Uprising, Its Roots, and Its Discontents,” L.P. charts the possibilities and contradictions of the wave of protests, riots, strikes, and occupations that spread across Serbia beginning in late 2024.
“[A]fter a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork—or underground work—often laid the foundation.”
—Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
On November 1, 2024, a recently renovated train station collapsed in Novi Sad, Serbia, killing 16 people. This was perhaps the clearest result of the state policies we have witnessed here in the past decade that prioritize capitalist profit over people’s wellbeing or even survival. The government’s obvious culpability in these deaths led to massive protests breaking out almost immediately.1 By the end of November, students all over the country began occupying their universities and instituting directly democratic student councils to organize the movement.
In the wake of this incident, we have seen massive protests against official corruption, the state, and its violence. The government’s response has been mass arrests and threats of university privatizations. The protests have spread throughout society, involving not only students, but also local citizens’ assemblies, school teachers, trade unions, war veterans, biker gangs, and many other groups organizing against the state. We have seen a proliferation of radically democratic counter-institutions inside the movement, as well as tactics of occupations and strikes—something we have never seen at this scale in Serbia before.
International observers have been following these events closely, inspired by the sight of hundreds of thousands of protestors challenging the right-wing authoritarianism that has been on the rise throughout the world in recent years. However, each has interpreted the movement through their own specific lens: liberal European politicians have seen it as a non-violent mass protest for European values; libertarian leftists as a people’s movement against “neoliberalism” and for radical democracy; far-right and authoritarian leftist groups as merely another “Color Revolution” instigated by the West. Strictly speaking, it hasn’t really been any of those things.
While elements of radical democracy have been present, as well as pro-(Western)-democracy attitudes and tendencies, the movement has also been highly diverse, full of contradictions and without a clearly defined goal. That is probably also why it has grown so popular: it tends to stay away from controversial topics and ideological debates. It does not clearly define its vision for societal change.
Of course, the movement did not emerge in a vacuum. Although the way the uprising has been organized differs considerably from movements we have seen in Serbia before, it still carries their DNA. Various elements of Serbian society and its recent history have come together in a confluence to produce the uprising. If we are to learn anything from these events, we need to understand all of these disparate elements and what their “spontaneous” explosion might be able to tell us about the terrain of future struggles.
While the movement seems to be dying down after being active non-stop for almost a year (as of August 2025), with many universities ending their blockades, and many citizens’ assemblies quietly dissipating, it is still highly unpredictable where things are going. Still, it is useful to reflect on the roots of the movement, current Serbian society, and where the events have led us so far.
Contemporary Serbia is largely defined by the 1990s. It’s a country still reckoning with what remains of Yugoslavia. As Marxist-Leninist regimes across the world went through economic, social, and political crises during the 1980s, political-economic elites in those states looked for ways to retain their positions. In Yugoslavia, this manifested as a rise of nationalist and separatist fervor instigated by influential (current or former) Communist officials, who successfully outmaneuvered their rivals in the party, many of whom advocated more permissive and market-socialist-oriented roads similar to those advocated by Gorbachev or Deng Xiaoping. In Serbia this wave of nationalism was spearheaded by Slobodan Milošević, a man who would soon lead Serbia into war with the other republics. He led a brutally repressive regime, which, while holding nominally democratic elections, would in practice violently repress any attempts at dissent by opposition activists, students, workers, anti-war groups, and ethnic minorities.
It was this period that would come to define the Serbian political climate of today. On one side was a coalition of former hardline Communist officials, organized crime, the state security apparatus, and the far-right; on the other there was a big-tent anti-government movement of liberal democrats (led by the Democratic Party), moderate former Communists, progressive civil society activists, and a sizeable number of right-wing groups who viewed the government as insufficiently nationalistic. These opposing coalitions, formed out of convenience and the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” would dominate Serbia’s politics. Even though some of the specific groupings have shifted, the broad strokes have remained the same, with large, “post-ideological” coalitions leading the charge against violent state and parastate repression.
The current president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, along with large swaths of his current party (the Serbian Progressive Party or SNS), also started their careers in the 1990s as members of the neo-fascist Serbian Radical Party. While the Radical Party at the time presented a critical attitude towards the Milošević government, it represented a fundamentally controlled opposition, supporting and propping up many of the government’s repressive and genocidal policies while violently attacking all those who opposed it. This eventually resulted in the party forming a coalition government with the then-ruling Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). However, while the SPS still maintained some vestiges of the old state, including some social benefits and state control over parts of the economy (though simultaneously privatizing many state-owned enterprises and abolishing the system of workers’ self-management), the Radicals wanted a clear break with the old system. They despised the Communists, identifying themselves with the collaborationist right-wing Chetnik forces of World War Two and advocating an aggressive process of complete privatization of the economy. Despite their populist rhetoric aimed at Serbia’s increasingly dispossessed population, their actual agenda favored large capital and massive cuts to social spending.
At the end of the decade, following years of war, sanctions, and other forms of international pressure, mass protests led by the broad social and political coalition against Milošević overthrew the government and ushered in an era of democratic reform. Cracks in this coalition quickly started to show in debates over how much the existing security apparatus (loyal to the previous government, with ties to organized crime and far-right groups) should be dismantled, what the attitude of the government should be towards the EU, and how to deal with war criminals hiding in Serbia from the ICC. This turbulent period also led to an even more aggressive and rapid privatization of state-owned enterprises, which were sold off to either their previous party-appointed “managers,” people close to the new governing parties, or—more often than not—multinational corporations. These processes were rarely transparent and left large swaths of the workforce unemployed. This led to a sizable but fragmented and defensive movement of workers fighting to keep their jobs, obtain unpaid wages, and resist privatization altogether. However, these movements, while successful in some of their goals, weren’t able to stop the processes of mass privatization and deindustrialization. Because post-communist trade unions have been weak and cozy with the state, contemporary worker organizing has generally been passive and unable to play as significant a role in Serbian politics as other groups like local movements, liberal-democratic parties, or even non-governmental organizations.
By the mid-2000s, after years of unstable governments, snap elections, economic slumps, and violence by organized crime and far-right groups (resulting in the murder of Serbia’s first democratically elected prime minister, Zoran Đinđić, in 2003), it seemed that a consensus was cautiously emerging. More and more people in Serbia supported EU accession and democratic reforms. Civil society groups and independent media outlets formed, and Serbia gradually re-integrated into the global capitalist economy, bringing optimism that the economic situation was starting to improve.
This was complicated, however, by two nearly simultaneous events. The first was the Great Recession following the 2008 economic crash. The second was Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia (on the basis of its predominantly Albanian population). While the then-ruling Democratic Party managed to retain power by forming a coalition with their former nemesis, Milošević’s SPS, a shift was imminent. Then, the Radical Party’s popularity exploded after a fraction split off to form the SNS as a moderate, pro-European conservative party. This effort was led by Tomislav Nikolić, who had previously served as acting president of the Radicals while its founder and actual leader was on trial for war crimes in the Hague. Nikolić’s second-in-command was the much younger and more charismatic Aleksandar Vučić.
This shift in rhetoric was enough to siphon off much of the Democratic Party’s voting base, attracting conservative nationalists who nevertheless wanted the economic benefits of EU membership, as well as many anti-systemic voters hungry for a change from the status quo. The incumbent government rightly appeared to many voters as inefficient, corrupt, chaotic, and unfair towards the average, working person. The SNS moved to harness this dissatisfaction, and their strategy paid off. After moderate gains in the 2012 elections, which allowed it to form a minority government (in coalition with the SPS) and take over the presidency, the party won a sweeping parliamentary majority in 2014, gaining a grip on power that it has not let go of since.
The early years of SNS rule didn’t demonstrate much fundamental change. The new government, despite its far-right past, appeared to align with the direction in which the previous government had been moving. The SNS continued the path of EU accession, complying with the reforms that the EU required of Serbia. In this, the new government initially saw more success than their Democratic predecessors. They started accession talks in 2014 and opened the first chapters in the negotiation process the following year.
Not much appeared to change for civil society, either, though there were some indications of an opening up. The new government allowed the Belgrade Pride march to be held in 2014. Such marches had not taken place since 2010, when the previous government had banned Pride in response to widespread far-right violence. In 2014, no major incidents occurred and the march has been held annually ever since. At the level of media, right-wing and liberal outlets took turns criticizing and praising the government, depending on the issue.
Despite the previous hardline nationalist and expansionist rhetoric of its members, the SNS-led government appeared to be more moderate on the issue of Kosovo. The 2013 Brussels agreement normalized relations between the two de facto independent states of Serbia and Kosovo, yet selective terminology allowed the Serbian government plausible deniability regarding Kosovo’s statehood in order to save face among voters—for whom Kosovan independence has been extremely unpopular.
For Serbians, what we witnessed during the early SNS years was a continuation of the liberal capitalist, moderate nationalist, pro-EU consensus that had come to dominate the Serbian political landscape over the previous decade. This image soon began to crack.
One defining feature of the current government throughout its tenure has been a tendency for massive public–private joint ventures led by foreign firms. These are typically expensive, large-scale construction projects, through which companies close to the government skim money using opaque contracts that exclude citizen participation or consideration of working peoples’ needs. The foreign capital funding these projects comes from many countries including the UAE, Germany, China, the UK, and the US. The first of these major projects to gain notoriety was the Belgrade Waterfront, a massive Dubai-style project of gentrification, aimed at constructing a new neighborhood of skyscrapers for the ultra-rich while demolishing an older, largely proletarian part of town. A massive resistance movement to this arose under the name of Don’t Let Belgrade D(r)own!, which led diverse but largely symbolic protests and petitions against this and other similar projects. This was the first glimpse we caught of the methods of repression this government would be willing to deploy, with masked men (likely tied to organized crime networks) demolishing buildings in the middle of the night in 2016 so that citizens and activists wouldn’t have time to react.
In response, multiple local campaigns of mass resistance confronted these controversial projects funded by foreign capital. For example, there were massive protests, occupations, and acts of sabotage by villagers against a project to build a hydropower dam that would affect all local rivers in the Stara Planina mountain range. There was also a series of protests and occasional encampments in major cities against the demolition of remaining green spaces to make way for new construction. The largest of these campaigns opposed a lithium mine owned by Rio Tinto that would have devastated the livelihoods of local villagers. This movement saw both massive protests and encampments throughout the country, as well as decentralized blockades of major roads.
Many of the oppositional movements that have characterized the previous decade thus ended up being local and grassroots in character, with a focus on the idea that citizens should directly determine the built environment in their own communities. This led to a sizeable presence of local and municipalist political parties, as well as (sometimes successful) community attempts to take over institutions of neighborhood governance left over from the system of worker’s self-management, which are supposed to allow citizens to gather together and have their voices heard in the city government.
Throughout this period, the national government became increasingly repressive and gradually took control over all levels of society—from city councils and public enterprises down to schools, cultural institutions, student parliaments, and media outlets. It got to the point that almost all local governments are now controlled by the SNS or their coalition partners in ethnic minority areas. This trend provoked a new big-tent movement whose protests were generally large, all arising as a response to some form of repression: highly controlled presidential elections in 2017, brutal violence against opposition figures in 2019, manipulated covid statistics before the 2020 elections (in order to lift lockdowns—causing many people to get infected—with the measures restored immediately after the election), and the government’s lackadaisical response to two mass shootings in 2023.
Three features characterized all these protests. First was their top-down approach: they were often organized and controlled by mainstream opposition parties or groups close to them. Second, the protests were usually docile and shied away from civil disobedience, destruction of property, or disruption of economic infrastructure. Finally, they lacked ideological or programmatic coherence, with liberal and far-right groups organizing together, while left-wing groups and progressive civil society organizations would take part on the margins. While largely ineffective in their goals, these movements did lead to new waves of organizing and a restructuring of the political scene, with almost all the currently active major parties emerging from these waves. Many new civil society groups and networks arose as well, from the left-wing housing movement formed in the wake of the 2017 protests, to the youth and student-led pro-democracy activist groups formed in the wake of the 2023 protests. The latter in particular would end up playing an important role in the current movement, at least initially.
On this topic of student activism, one more historical point should be reviewed before we begin our examination of the ongoing wave of protests. Student-led movements played an important role in the opposition to the Milošević government in the 1990s, with many of the student leaders of the time ending up as important political figures after his overthrow. However, the character of such movements shifted after the democratic reforms of the 2000s. In the early 21st century, they usually organized only against capitalist restructuring of higher education, and so were broadly left-wing. Their methods of organizing differed from their predecessors and involved blockades of the universities. These blockades led to directly democratic student assemblies that attempted to give a voice to student grievances. While tactics and organizing strategies were certainly shared between the different generations of student activists (as well as between students from different countries, with the most important connection perhaps being with those from Croatia), what defined the new movements was their lack of continuity. Waves of protests and occupations would appear in response to new market-oriented measures by the universities, then they would explode and eventually die down without forming more permanent structures. Any student organizations that formed in this period tended to not last beyond a single generation, after which a new group would form from scratch.
While still partially dealing with student issues and using the tactics of blockades and building occupations that marked the previous two decades, the student-led groups that formed after the 2023 protests were different. Their primary focus has been resistance to the government and its authoritarian structures, rather than focusing on the commercialization of education or the advocacy of direct democracy and left-wing politics as their predecessors had. In this they more closely resembled the movements of the 1990s, organizing for all sorts of issues outside the universities. It should be noted that these groups were generally small and had limited influence both on the student body and the public at large. However, they were instrumental in organizing many actions against government policies, and this would place them in a key position to channel the public anger after the train station collapsed in 2024.
In 2021, the SNS government awarded a sweetheart deal to a consortium of construction companies to rehabilitate a railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city. Part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative aimed at building transportation infrastructure in Southeast Europe, this project involved all the elements present in the aforementioned cases that have become associated with the regime: inflated costs, lack of transparency, subservient2 cooperation with foreign capital that would allow it to profit massively while disregarding the needs of the community and the workers, and presenting the project as something of great national importance—which the government used as propaganda for its developmentalist image.
On November 1, 2024, in a tragically preventable accident, the canopy in front of the train station collapsed and killed 16 people. Sensing a major image problem, the government went on the defensive. After Vučić had taken personal credit for this project for years, posing for photo-ops and opening ceremonies, the government quickly tried to distance themselves by denying that the faulty portion of the station had even been rebuilt in the first place. This blatant attempt to cover up their role—even as survivors and dead bodies were still being pulled from the rubble—only served to cement the government’s guilt in the eyes of the public. They immediately started pulling all publicly available documentation related to the project, signaling further guilt.
Building on the anger with SNS rule that had been building through the preceding years of smaller protest movements, this event sparked an explosion of revolt on the streets. While initial demonstrations were called by activist groups led by students and other young people, in coordination with some local opposition parties, they immediately expanded beyond their control. These groups had called on people to gather without marking themselves any sort of leaders, but the atmosphere made this precaution seem unnecessary: the demos would probably have erupted even without being called by those particular groups. The marches over the next few days were some of the largest in recent years, involving property destruction and clashes with the police—especially in Novi Sad, where City Hall was breached and painted blood red. While this kind of rioting is rare in Serbian protests and often speculated to be instigated by government agents trying to discredit the movements (since they have rarely been the targets of subsequent police repression), this time many of the people participating saw this kind of response as entirely appropriate—even if it turned out that it had been orchestrated.
The riot in Novi Sad led to a brutal police response against demonstrators, with many people being beaten or arrested, including students. The repression initially led to a somewhat more radical response from the movement, with opposition members of parliament blocking the city’s courthouse to demand the release of arrested protesters. This second round of demonstrations was also somewhat decentralized, with activist groups calling on people to blockade roads every Friday wherever they happen to be for 14 minutes of silence (to signify the 14 people who had died by that point—two more would succumb to their wounds in the coming weeks). These actions were met with new repressive tactics: Thugs close to the government attacked these protests, driving cars into the crowds and using other forms of physical violence. This backfired as well. After students from the university drama school were attacked, they organized a blockade of their school, demanding that the attackers be arrested and that students held in custody be released. In the coming weeks, their fellow students from other campuses and universities would follow in their footsteps. Soon, all campuses of all the public universities throughout Serbia would be blockaded.
In the university blockades, students organized themselves in directly democratic assemblies, inspired by previous movements—although on a much larger scale this time. Many of the students were also supported by university staff (at least initially), with some schools even officially endorsing the demands. The movement would expand greatly over the coming months, with a massive, decentralized base of student activists launching all kinds of innovative actions against the government.
Part 2 will appear in Heatwave issue 3
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