Serbia students march into Belgrade before election

Students marching from across Serbia entered Belgrade on Wednesday evening ahead of their final rally before snap parliamentary elections on Sunday.

More than 1,000 students from several cities and towns headed toward the capital, where several thousand people welcomed the first marchers in central Belgrade. Residents along the route greeted them with food, cheers and other displays of support.

The student-backed election list is posing the biggest challenge to the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS, of former president Aleksandar Vucic. The list will hold its last demonstration in central Belgrade on Thursday evening.

The snap vote was called after nearly two years of student-led demonstrations that began after a canopy collapsed at the Novi Sad railway station in November 2024, killing 16 people. The tragedy has been widely blamed on corruption and triggered some of Serbia's largest protests since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

A snap election was a key demand of the student-led movement. Vucic called the ballot in September and later resigned as president to run for prime minister.

Vucic, who is heading the SNS election list, held his party's final major rally in the southern city of Nis on Wednesday. He pledged to defeat his opponents on Sunday and announced smaller rallies in Belgrade and other cities on Thursday.