The movement that won Serbia’s election on Sunday has started governing before it holds office. Newly elected MPs from the Student List, which ended 14 years of rule by Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party, stood in Pioneers’ Park opposite parliament in Belgrade on Thursday and demanded the immediate dismissal of every police officer who had broken the law, naming the heads of the police, the BIA security agency and the anti terror unit, and called for senior judicial figures to step down as well.
The stated reason is the calendar. The formal transfer of power will take weeks, final results still await a rerun at about 50 polling stations next Sunday, and the movement says outgoing officials could destroy documentation in the interval. It urged public servants to secure evidence of potential wrongdoing, demanded urgent investigations into high level corruption cases it says were sidelined under political pressure, and pledged to review public contracts and spending deals, including military procurement. Changes are starting now, student Filip Ubovic said, adding that the list is not here to take revenge but asking for adherence to the laws, professionalism and responsibility.
The first resignation has already come from an adjacent institution. Manja Grcic, director of the state broadcaster RTS, accused of biased reporting during the protests, stepped down on Wednesday, and the broadcaster’s Novi Sad branch apologised for selective reporting. The movement’s candidates, 141 of them on reported preliminary figures against 106 for the SNS, were professors, doctors, artists and athletes chosen through faculty plenums rather than students themselves, and they campaign on a policy plan the movement puts at 1,200 pages.
The outgoing camp is contesting the framing, not yet the result. Vucic accused the winners of revolutionary terror after groups stormed the Informer TV station, which had branded the students traitors during the campaign, and acting president Ana Brnabic accused them of choosing revolutionary justice over the rule of law. The movement began with protests after the November 2024 collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad killed 16 people. Whether its first acts read as accountability or purge will be decided by the same question now facing the police and judiciary chiefs: whether they go quietly, and what the courts say if they do not.