Serbia Election Shocker: Vucic Concedes Defeat as Students' List Projected to Win Majority

In a stunning turn in Serbian politics, longtime leader Aleksandar Vucic has conceded defeat in Sunday's snap parliamentary election, saying his list was beaten by the student-backed opposition movement. Speaking at his party's election headquarters, Vucic estimated the Students' List would win between 135 and 140 seats in the 250-seat National Assembly, against around 105 for his own list - enough for an outright majority, which needs 126 seats.
Independent projections point the same way. An early Ipsos/CeSID projection cited in election-night coverage put the Students' List on 52.0% of the vote and 138 seats, with Vucic's list on 39.3% and 104 seats. But these are projections, not the certified result: Serbia's electoral commission was still counting, and its earliest partial tallies - covering only a small fraction of polling stations - had briefly shown a very different picture. Vucic himself said his concession rested on a stratified sample, not the finished count, so the final official numbers still matter.
The vote caps nearly two years of student-led protests that began after a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November 2024, killing 16 people. What started as demands for accountability over that disaster grew into a broad movement challenging corruption and the concentration of power - and on Sunday, with turnout reported past 67%, the highest since the Yugoslav era, that movement appears to have carried its fight from the streets into parliament.
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