Serbia voted on Sunday, October 25, 2026, in snap parliamentary elections that pit Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) against a student-led list seeking to oust it after nearly two years of protests. Polls opened Sunday and close at 8:00 pm local time, according to the outline’s reporting. The Serbia election 2026 vote is set to be the most fiercely contested parliamentary election in more than 14 years, according to SCMP (HK).
The vote follows nearly two years of student-led protests that began with the 2024 collapse of a canopy at Novi Sad railway station. The collapse killed 16 people, a tragedy widely blamed on corruption, according to The Hindu (IN). Vučić dissolved parliament on September 9 after a proposal from the government. In late September he resigned the presidency to lead the SNS campaign for prime minister, according to Euronews.
Eighteen electoral lists, with 2,418 candidates in total, are competing for the 250 seats in the National Assembly. More than 6.45 million people are eligible to vote, according to Euronews. The Students’ List, backed by a largely leaderless movement, has 250 candidates. Most are experts from academia and the arts with little political experience, according to The Hindu (IN).
A final pre-election rally in Belgrade on October 22 drew around 150,000 people, according to an independent protest monitor. The monitor is not named in the reporting, and the figure has not been independently confirmed.
Parliamentary turnout has averaged just over 55% during SNS rule. That is down from around 70% in the vote that ousted Slobodan Milosevic, according to The Hindu (IN).
The student movement began after the Novi Sad tragedy and expanded from calls for a transparent investigation into demands for an early election. Vučić has accused the movement of plotting a foreign-funded coup. Euronews reports that officials claim foreign actors are behind it. The students say their focus is accountability and anti-corruption. The sources do not offer evidence for the foreign-actor claims.
The 2023 election offers a point of comparison. Opposition parties grouped as ‘Serbia Against Violence’ won around 24% of the vote and 65 seats, but have since fragmented.
Several points remain disputed or unconfirmed. Twenty-four civil society organisations issued a joint statement saying conditions for free and fair elections were lacking. No response from Vučić or the SNS to that statement has been reported. Euronews says polls differ and many voters are undecided, and no current poll figures were available.
No official or final results have been published, so the outcome is unknown at the time of writing. The results, the 3% electoral threshold and which parties, including minority lists, could back a coalition government will determine the next steps. Coverage here relies on three outlets, and the Euronews article was cut off mid-text, so some details may be incomplete.
Sources
This article was written with AI assistance from the published reporting listed above. It is part of the World Brief daily news podcast.