Student Ticket Wins, Vucic Concedes Defeat

Celebration of the Victory of the "Student ticket - Students will win" the Parliamentary elections (BETAPHOTO/MILAN OBRADOVIC)

On Oct. 26, the State Electoral Commission announced the preliminary results of the previous day’s snap parliamentary election, based on 8,077 out of 8,210 polling stations, according to which the Student Ticket – The Students Will Win garnered 2,211,400 votes, i.e. 52.54 percent, while the regime’s Aleksandar Vucic – United Serbia ticket won 1,653,868 votes, i.e. 39.29 percent.

With 91,673 votes, i.e. 2.18 percent, the Socialist Party of Serbia’s Ivica Dacic – The Factor of Stability ticket did not manage to pass the threshold and will not participate in the National Assembly for the first time since the multi-party system was introduced in 1990.

All other tickets garnered less than one percent of votes.

The Oct. 25 elections saw a record turnout of 4,211,957 votes, i.e. 68.78 percent – the highest in over three decades. This was preceded by nearly two years of massive anti-regime protest, sparked by the Nov. 1, 2024 Novi Sad Railway Station collapse, which killed 16 people and left one victim with life-altering injuries. The country’s university students served as a driving force behind the protest, organizing blockades of their schools, countless marches, cycling to Strasbourg and, finally, creating their own ticket of eminent experts without prior political affiliations.

An hour after domestic polling stations closed – since certain abroad locations stayed open much longer due to high turnout and too few stations – Progressive Party of Serbia founder Aleksandar Vucic announced that a stratified sample of ballots indicated the coalition led by his party had lost.

Vucic, who resigned from his nearly-complete second term as president of state on Sept. 27, asserted that his ticket’s future MPs will not obstruct the forming of the National Assembly’s new convocation.

Following the Student Ticket victory, the public took to the streets of Belgrade and most larger cities to celebrate, while members of the student movement gathered in the capital’s Slavija square – the location of the largest and most significant anti-regime rallies of the past two years.