Mass protests and clashes rocked Belgrade as thousands demanded early elections and challenged President Aleksandar Vucic’s long rule, with Serbia’s student-led anti-corruption movement showing no signs of slowing down.
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Police fired teargas and clashed with protesters in central Belgrade on Saturday, May 23, 2026, as tens of thousands gathered to demand early elections and an end to the more than decade-long rule of President Aleksandar Vucic.
People crowded into Slavija Square, one of the capital’s main junctions, in a fresh eruption of demonstrations that started a year and a half ago when a deadly roof collapse triggered a youth-led movement against alleged corruption and mismanagement.
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Crowds of protesters streamed into central Belgrade, many carrying banners and wearing T-shirts inscribed with the “Students win” motto of the youth movement. Columns of cars drove into Belgrade from other Serbian towns earlier in the day.
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On 1 November 2024, a renovated concrete canopy collapsed at the railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, killing 14 people on the spot and injuring several others. Two more people died later, the 16th victim being a 19-year-old student.
The tragedy became a flashpoint for frustrations with the government, with many Serbians saying it had been caused by alleged corruption and negligence in state infrastructure projects.
Protesters’ demands coalesced around justice and the rule of law. They insisted on full transparency in station project, including release of all construction documents, and prosecution of those responsible for corruption that led to collapse.
The student-led movement began after the Novi Sad disaster in November 2024 and is pushing for early elections.
Unlike earlier protests in Serbia, the student-led movement shattered turnout records, with youth and first-time protesters, Generation Z, pouring into the streets. Demonstrations in Novi Sad drew up to 100,000 people, and Belgrade saw rallies of similar scale.
The students on Saturday demanded an early parliamentary election and the rule of law, accusing the government of criminality.
While the rally at a central square in Belgrade passed largely peacefully, groups of young demonstrators later split and clashed with riot police, throwing flares, rocks and bottles at police cordons, who responded with pepper spray as they charged forward to disperse them.
The demonstrators, including apparent soccer hooligans, rolled trash cans into the streets as shield-carrying riot police tried to surround them.
The venue on Saturday was Belgrade’s Slavija Square, the scene of a huge antigovernment protest in March 2025.
That rally ended in sudden disruption that experts later said, and the government denied, involved the use of a sonic weapon.
With students leading the anticorruption movement, the demonstrations have snowballed into a campaign to push Vucic to call early elections.
Vucic said this week that the ballot could be held between September and November this year.
Vucic is a populist whose Progressive Party-led coalition holds 156 of the 250 parliamentary seats. He has previously refused snap elections and has been intent on continuing his second term, which ends in 2027, when parliamentary elections are also taking place.
His opponents accuse him and his allies of ties to organised crime, violence against rivals, and curbing media freedoms, charges they deny.
Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic pushed back hard against the protesters. Vucic told reporters on Saturday that unspecified “foreign powers” were behind the protest. He said police should be restrained, but warned that “thugs will face justice.”
The sustained pressure achieved a partial victory on 28 January 2025, when Serbia’s Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned, along with the Mayor of Novi Sad.
This marked a major concession to protesters, who nevertheless continued their action as their key request was a call for snap elections.
In the days ahead of the protest, police arrested about a dozen antigovernment activists, charging them with undermining the constitution and terrorism. All denied the charges.
The rally in June 2025, attended by about 140,000 people according to the Independent Protest Monitor, Archive of Public Gatherings, was one of the largest in the student-led demonstrations. The May 23, 2026 protest shows the movement has now sustained itself for more than 18 months.
Serbia continues to in a deep political crisis. At first, the student-led protest movement sought justice for the victims and an investigation into the corruption said to have caused the tragedy.
It has since grown into broader push to remove Vucic from power through elections.
Protest on May 23, 2026 confirmed that movement has not lost momentum. Big crowds suggested the dissent persists more than a year after protests first started to demand accountability for the train station tragedy.
Vucic remains in office, elections have not yet been called, and students remain at the centre of one of the longest sustained protest campaigns in Serbia’s recent history.
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