Is Serbia heading toward a Serbo-Maidan?

Mass demonstrations against Aleksandar Vucic’s government could turn brutal in the year ahead.

For more than a year, Serbia has been gripped by an unbroken chain of marches, blockades, campus sit-ins, and mass demonstrations. Revolts first erupted in the aftermath of the Novi Sad railway station disaster in November 2024, when 16 people were killed by the collapse of concrete canopy. What started as grief quickly curdled into fury, and that fury has become a permanent feature of Serbian daily life. The streets have not emptied. The chants have not faded. Yet, for all the spectacle and scale, Serbia is no closer to political transformation than it was when students first took to the streets.

Last March, I argued in this magazine that political naivete had hamstrung the protests. They had the numbers but no strategy; they embodied public rage but lacked a plan for converting outrage into change.

Ten months on, that assessment still holds true. The opposition has gained no tangible leverage, President Aleksandar Vucic remains firmly in control, and the government has responded to the unrest not with concessions but with pushback. Nevertheless, the protesters have not gone home. Quite the opposite: The movement has grown more entrenched, more confrontational, and increasingly combustible. This pattern warrants a worrying comparison with Ukraine between 2013 and 2014, when a wave of mass civil unrest and revolutionary violence ultimately toppled pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. Is Serbia heading toward its own Euromaidan—a “Serbo-Maidan,” if you will—which could see a similarly bloody turn on the streets of Belgrade?

Although there is still reason to doubt that Serbia’s unrest will escalate so rapidly, it is increasingly difficult to imagine other outcomes. Snap parliamentary elections are expected to take place later this year, but the odds are so stacked in the government’s favor through its domination of domestic media and a robust spoils system that the protest movement is almost certain to face huge disappointment. Whether that leaves the movement deflated or pushes it to more radical measures will make all the difference between the same miserable status quo or a brutal Serbo-Maidan ahead.

To be sure, Vucic—an autocratic kleptocrat often misunderstood to be a right-wing populist—is no stranger to shrugging off demonstrations. Since he was first elected in 2017, hardly a year has passed that hasn’t been marked by mass protests. There were the anti-lockdown protests during the COVID-19 pandemic, the protests against mining giant Rio Tinto in 2021 and again in 2024, the “Serbia Against Violence” protests of 2023, and many more. But aside from the violent lockdown protests, which forced the government to abort new lockdown measures in 2020, all those uprisings eventually fizzled out.

The current wave, by contrast, persists without achieving breakthrough or collapse. The protests are larger than any Vucic has ever faced, although it’s difficult to get precise figures. Widely accepted estimates range from between 100,000 and 325,000 for the largest protests. (The highest figure put out by the government, which routinely undercounts, is 107,000.) Protesters have staged numerous blockades of major roads, which the government claims are damaging Serbia’s economic performance. The situation has become a total political stalemate. But something must give. Either the government willingly folds (unimaginable) or the dissidents escalate further (possible but improbable until after the elections).

A year on, the movement’s fundamental problem remains unchanged. It still has no political vehicle capable of channeling widespread public discontent. Activists have finally accepted that, despite Serbia’s Potemkin democracy, they will have to beat Vucic at the ballot box and have demanded snap elections for months now. While Vucic’s support for elections by the end of 2026 appears to be a concession to the protests, he could just as easily delay them until next spring, if he deems that in his interest. But as opposition politicians play, at best, supporting roles in the protests, they have so far failed to produce anything resembling viable candidates for this year or next. No charismatic unifying figures have emerged. No coherent coalition has formed.

Attempts to expand the movement beyond urban intellectuals and toward provincial workers, who remain Vucic’s most reliable constituency, have been patchy. The anti-government bloc fixates on abstract ideals such as greater transparency, accountable institutions, and rule of law, but it is unable to offer anything material to wavering Vucic voters or the undecided. Citizens cannot live on media freedoms alone.

Meanwhile, Vucic’s government—already well versed in combating dissent—has become increasingly confrontational. It routinely uses plainclothes provocateurs at demonstrations. The sight of burly men with shaved heads lurking behind police lines and hurling pyrotechnics or debris into the crowd to trigger chaos and justify security forces’ intervention is commonplace. Among these individuals are hardened criminals, including a football hooligan once convicted of murdering a French fan in Belgrade before his unexpected release from prison several years ago. As opposition figures are physically assaulted by pro-government thugs, this clearly illustrates that the regime is willing to dip into Serbia’s underworld networks to maintain control.

There are also credible allegations—though still officially denied—that during one demonstration last March, the police deployed a military-grade sonic weapon to disperse the crowd. That such a claim is even plausible reflects the increasingly militarized posture of the state. From the perspective of many protesters, Vucic has shed even the pretense of restraint.

Meanwhile, unrest has spread outside Belgrade, especially in northern towns where protesters have vandalized local offices of Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party and clashed with party loyalists. What was once a mostly peaceful civic movement has begun to show fractures. People are losing patience, and the sense of repetition without progress has produced a combustible frustration.

Layered beneath this political confrontation is a profound demographic and economic transformation. Serbia, long a victim of brain drain and extreme outmigration, is now experiencing mass immigration for the first time. Last year, the country issued some 100,000 work permits to foreign workers from India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Egypt, and elsewhere—a dramatic year-on-year rise of 20,000, with even sharper increases expected after the government’s new labor mobility agreement with Ghana comes into effect.

This influx is the result of the government’s eagerness to attract foreign investment, as well as Serbs’ unwillingness to accept the paltry wages offered by many employers. Fiat’s automotive plant in Kragujevac, for instance, is importing some 800 foreign workers to fill roles that the city’s nearly 9,000 unemployed residents refuse to take. In a culturally conservative country already wounded by deep economic inequality, this pours fuel onto the fire and has already led to attacks on migrant housing in Kragujevac. There is a strong nationalist element to the student protests that could easily capitalize on the issue of migration and demographic change. Across Europe, anti-migration politics have toppled governments. There’s no reason that Serbia should be immune to this risk.

Rather than mitigating these tensions, Vucic appears intent on compounding them. When a well-known far-right group attempted to organize an anti-migration rally last October, the government banned the protest outright and threatened participants with arrest. This crackdown did not come from a place of concern for minorities. Instead, it was a warning that the state would bulldoze any threat to foreign investments. If the authorities are willing to crush relatively fringe groups with limited constituencies, one can only imagine how they will respond to future rounds of mass ecological protests over the Rio Tinto lithium project.

Ecology, anti-corruption, and anti-imperialist economic grievances have already proved to be powerful unifying themes across Serbia’s fractured political spectrum; anti-migration sentiment also appears to be rapidly rising. Together, these issues form the basis of a potentially broad anti-Vucic coalition—one that spans urban intellectuals, rural farmers, environmentalists, progressives, and nationalists.

As elections loom, protesters should pay attention to these warnings and start looking for serious, viable candidates. If they can avoid sinking into internal divisions and remain united around an anti-status quo platform, they have the chance to pull off an unexpected upset and build a platform for change. If they fail in this aim, the protests will likely either fizzle out or take a more violent turn.

That brings us back to Serbo-Maidan. The comparison is imperfect, and its likelihood should not be overstated. Vucic is no Yanukovych—at least not yet. But he is a leader who governs as though public opinion is irrelevant; laughs arrogantly at a population whose grievances have boiled over; openly provokes demonstrators who have lost patience with peaceful protest; and rules over a political system that offers no legitimate mechanism for change. Numerous watchdogs describe a hybrid regime under electoral autocracy that is able to skew votes heavily in its favor. These claims are partisan and alarmist but offer a fair assessment: Serbia is creeping toward a tipping point. On the other side is greater state oppression, more violence, and further escalation, from government thugs and protesters alike.

Could all this be avoided? In theory, yes. If Brussels were willing to impose serious consequences—sanctions, funding freezes, aggressive diplomatic pressure—it could force Vucic to restrain the more abusive elements of his response. But the EU has made clear that it considers Serbia too strategically important and its lithium too economically valuable to risk alienating Belgrade.

European political actors also worry about the nationalist elements within the protest movement and the possibility that punishing Vucic could inadvertently empower figures further to his right. They also fear that Vucic could pivot toward alternative allies in response—primarily China but also the United States and Russia.

Discontented Serbs must face the difficult realization that if change is to come, it won’t arrive through peaceful protest. With daunting electoral prospects, violence might appear to be their only other option. Given the state’s vast technological advantage over the protesters, the odds are not in their favor. They will therefore have to ask themselves if they are willing to risk everything for change—even their lives.

For now, I suspect that the answer is no. Barring intense escalations, protests with alternating spates of violence and restraint will likely continue until elections take place. The next critical juncture will be 2027, when Vucic faces presidential elections. He has reached his two-term limit and cannot run again. But with no obvious successor, he either quits politics after 15 years in power or simply rotates to the premiership once again, similar to how Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev switched places in 2012. It will almost certainly be the latter—and that’s when the situation is most likely to explode.