On the morning of January 27, students of the Belgrade faculties began assembling at Autokomanda, a busy junction in the Serbian capital, for a 24-hour blockade they hoped would force the government to heed their demands. They arrived well-equipped, with tents, heaters, concrete blocks, food and hot drinks and endless witty placards. Soon, the tractors rolled in.

Farmers and bikers from nearby towns had come to defend students from the odd lunatics who, in previous weeks, had rammed their cars through student blockades. And so the farmers and students set up for a day of remonstration, allowing intervals for games of cards, basketball, chess tournaments and even roasted pig on the spit. The night before, streets across Belgrade had erupted at 8pm in a wild chorus of whistles, honks and clattering of pots and pans — an endearing call to arms.

For over two months now, Serbian students have forced the closure of almost all universities in the country. They are protesting government corruption, which they hold responsible for the collapse of a concrete canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad on November 1, 2024, which claimed 15 lives. Students have taken to the streets almost every day since, holding minutes of silence, blocking roads, organising strikes and rallying tens of thousands of supporters. Smaller gatherings of support have spread to the Serbian diaspora, in Athens, London, New York and beyond.

One of the largest protests took place in Belgrade outside the public broadcaster Radio and Television of Serbia (RTS) on January 17. The archive of public meetings estimated that 53,000 to 55,000 people gathered that night under the banner “our right to know everything”, criticising the broadcaster’s pro-government bias. A few brave workers surprised protesters when they unfurled a banner from the RTS building that read “RTS workers are with the students”.

Support for the protests has extended beyond students and their professors. According to research from the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (Crta), 68% of high schools and 48% of primary schools were either fully or partially suspended during the strike action on January 24. Over 200 companies, including big chains such as Cineplex and Laguna bookstore, shut up shop. Cultural institutions, theatres, libraries and museums, including the pop-up Bansky exhibit, were closed. Hair salons were cramming in appointments the night before. Prominent nightclubs and bars also closed, ensuring any wayward youth had nowhere interesting to spend their Friday night.

The outpouring of discontent in the wake of the tragedy has tapped into broader frustrations with the government. Students want accountability for the tragedy in Novi Sad, and they have a specific list of demands they believe will achieve that, including the release of classified documents and the prosecution of all those implicated in the disaster. But they are also fighting for wider societal change and an end to government corruption, nepotism and perceived institutional incompetence. 

The government’s reaction has been customary. On January 19, President Aleksandar Vucic declared on Happy television that the West is involved in an attempt to stage a colour revolution in Serbia — a reference to the Maidan uprising in Ukraine which led to the ousting of the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. “Everything they are doing” is an attempt at a “colour revolution”, Vucic said. A few days later, the police detained and expelled 14 foreign nationals who were attending an NGO summit in Belgrade.

This is not the first time the state has invoked the narrative of colour revolutions. In response to the demonstrations against alleged election rigging in the December 2023 elections, the government's first response was to declare that “Maidan won’t happen in Serbia”. Until now, however, the state has rarely taken action to limit the activities of NGOs. Last week was the first time that a group with no direct involvement in Serbian domestic politics has been banned from the country on security grounds.

Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin has been quick to warn about the West’s supposed involvement in the protests. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko suggested that the student protests are part of a broader Western strategy to undermine Serbia’s sovereignty. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko also chimed in, claiming that the protests were orchestrated by the United States. "Whoever gives money, orders the music," he said. 

Some in the West have also been tempted to see the protests in Serbia as a Russia-West issue, portraying the protesters as pro-Europeans fighting for EU values, against their “Kremlin-backed president Vucic”. Journalists have compared the protests in Serbia to those underway in Georgia or Slovakia, where mass protests have occurred in recent days and weeks against the pro-Russian policies of their governments.

But whereas the protests in Georgia are driven by a clear desire for closer ties with the European Union, Serbia’s protests are motivated by internal issues, rather than an antipathy toward Russia. By viewing the protests as another episode in the tug-of-war between the EU and Russia, one overlooks the real drivers of social unrest in Serbia, and risks playing into the narratives of the Serbian government.

There are clear differences between the protests occurring elsewhere in Europe and those in Serbia. However, they are similar to the extent that they share certain values: namely, respect for the rule of law, the right to a free press and an end to government corruption, all of which align with European values. Serbian protesters may not be waving the EU flag, but they are standing up for its values, or so the argument goes.

Most of the students protesting, however, insist that foreign policy has nothing to do with them, and reject the notion that this is anything but an internal issue. Boris Stanisic, a student at the Belgrade Faculty of Law, said in an interview: “We had cases where some people brought EU flags and Euromaidan flags to protests and people took them down. We don’t welcome that sentiment here. This is our internal issue. The EU or Russia don’t have anything to do with us. We are fighting corruption, for which people have lost their lives.” 

According to Boris and others like him, the protests began because of the disaster in Novi Sad, which demonstrated that institutions in Serbia were not doing their job. The collapse was a “direct outcome of negligence, incompetence and the absence of accountability,” says Sanja, a businesswoman in Belgrade who supports the students. “These failures were encouraged by a culture of corruption, which creates an environment where unqualified and incompetent individuals are appointed to critical positions.” 

Protesters believe that the tragedy was caused by the subpar reconstruction of the station in 2021 and are demanding the release of all contracts related to the station’s reconstruction, many of which remain classified. In Novi Sad, students are also demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Milos Vucevic, and the mayor of Novi Sad, Milan Djuric.

While the protesters may hope that their efforts lead to a stronger opposition movement and future change at the ballot box, they are not asking the president to resign or hoping for system change overnight. “That is a common misconception in the media. They always portray us as if we are fighting against the regime to topple the president. That is untrue,” Boris says, resenting the direction of our conversation. 

The protests in Serbia are thus fundamentally different to the colour revolutions that established new governments in the post-Soviet states in the early 2000s. “We are not talking about changing the regime, toppling anyone. We are fighting for the rule of law, for the institutions to start doing their jobs,” Boris adds. 

In contrast to the colour revolutions, and the protests now underway in Georgia, there is a deep ambivalence in Serbia toward the EU. This is driven by a widespread perception among protesters that EU leaders are ultimately uninterested in the opposition in Serbia and are happy to benefit from Vucic’s so-called stabilitocracy.

“Officials from the US, and both the EU and Russia, support president Vucic’s policy, and thus do not even try to focus on the student protests in Serbia,” said Dana Popovic, a Serbian economist and columnist. “We have a battle here to win – obviously with no support neither from the West nor Russia. So we simply don’t care.”

The EU’s alleged disinterest in the protests was affirmed last week when, in the midst of the daily demonstrations, the EU dispatched its director-general of enlargement negotiations, Gert Jan Koopman, to Belgrade. Koopman declared on X that Serbia was making steady progress in its reform efforts and was on the right track towards EU membership.

“Vucic is perfectly good for the west, he follows their interests,” Boris says, referring to the government’s lithium deal with the EU in July 2024. Lithium mining has been a source of huge controversy in Serbia, sparking widespread protests in 2021 and 2024. Ironically, it was the generally pro-EU opposition in Serbia protesting against the opening of the mine, and the usually pro-Russian government doing the EU’s bidding. 

Scepticism about the EU is also shaped by the legacy of the 1990s. Western policy was fundamentally hostile to Serb interests for the best part of the decade, starting with the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia’s independence in 1991 and culminating in Nato’s bombing of Serbia and Montenegro in 1999. In the aftermath of the war, there was a strong desire to become a “normal European country” and escape international isolation, but there remained a deep hostility toward the West. This experience complicated Serbia’s relations with the EU and US into the millennium.

A poll by IPSOS in December 2024 showed that while the EU garners pragmatic support among Serbs, with 46% saying they would support EU membership in a referendum, Russia and China enjoy far warmer emotional connections. Many Serbs hold favourable views of the two nations, often tied to historical alliances or tangible aid. According to Carnegie fellow Maxim Samorukov, Serbs are also tied to Russia by their common animosity toward the West. “Russia’s appeal to the Serbian public has less to do with what it stands for, and more with what it does not.”

The anti-Russian sentiment that is driving the protests in Georgia, and shaping its desire to join the EU, is entirely absent in Serbia. Serbs have been happy to see hundreds of thousands of Russians settle in the country since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war. Russian émigrés often retell stories of their exchanges with friendly Serbs professing their love of Russia in shops, bars or the back of a cab. By contrast, in Tbilisi, Georgians graffiti the streets with EU and Nato flags, as well as anti-Russian slogans such as “Ruzzki go home” or “Ruzzki not welcome”.

Serbia’s protests are thus fundamentally different to those anti-Russian, pro-EU demonstrations occurring elsewhere in Europe, and it sheds little light to compare the two.  The protests in Serbia are driven by a domestic demand for justice, accountability and an end to government corruption — not by foreign influence or a desire to pivot West. 

“The most important thing here and the biggest takeaway is that the people have realised that they can change something. There was a dominant mentality before that you can’t do anything, change anything, that you should just put your head down and work," says Boris. "The biggest change is that a lot of people have realised that you can actually do something to make this country better . ..About changing the regime – that is pretty far away.”

Serbia's ongoing protests are ultimately a call for reform, not revolution, and reflect a widespread desire for justice, transparency and an end to a corrupt system where, as Boris says, “you have to bribe officials to get anything done”.