Serbian students run 1,950 km to Brussels demanding EU pressure on Vucic

Eight countries. Eighteen days. One thousand nine hundred and fifty kilometres. When a group of Serbian university students arrived at the Berlaymont on Tuesday, they had run the distance from Novi Sad to Brussels on foot, crossing borders that their country's government has spent years promising to join but whose democratic standards it has steadily eroded.

They were greeted at the entrance to the European Commission by a small crowd of supporters and the strains of Bella Ciao, the Italian partisan anthem that has become a shorthand for resistance across the continent. For the students, the run was not a stunt. It was the latest escalation in a protest movement that has gripped Serbia for more than six months, sparked by the collapse of a concrete canopy at Novi Sad's railway station on 1 November 2024 that killed sixteen people.

From a canopy collapse to a national movement

The disaster in Novi Sad was not an accident in the eyes of the protesters. It was the visible consequence of a system in which public contracts are awarded without transparency, oversight bodies are captured, and accountability is optional. What began as vigils for the victims expanded into daily demonstrations across Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš and smaller towns, demanding the prosecution of those responsible, the release of all documentation on the station renovation, and the resignation of officials implicated in corruption.

The movement has remained stubbornly leaderless, organised through plenums at university faculties rather than political parties. That structure has frustrated the government's attempts to discredit it. President Aleksandar Vučić has variously labelled the protesters foreign agents, hooligans, and participants in a colour revolution. The students responded by inviting him to a public debate. He declined.

"We want to highlight the problems and make people in Serbia and around the world aware of what we're going through," Uroš Obradović, one of the runners, told DW in Brussels. "From the European Union, we expect understanding and support for our continued fight." His words reflect a calculation: the EU remains the only external actor with sufficient leverage to force institutional change in Belgrade.

The EPP breaks ranks with its associate member

That leverage has historically been blunted by the European People's Party. Vučić's Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has been an associate member of the EPP since 2019, a relationship that gave the Serbian president a centre-right shield in Brussels. When the European Parliament adopted its latest Progress Report on Serbia in April, the language was harsh, but the EPP's own delegation had previously watered down criticism.

That changed after Vučić attended Vladimir Putin's Victory Day parade in Moscow on 9 May, standing alongside the Russian president while the EU's leaders boycotted the event. The EPP issued a sharply worded statement declaring that a member of the EPP family should not be attending a military parade in Moscow. For Nemanja Todorović Štiglija, editor-in-chief of European Western Balkans, the shift is structural. "There was a diplomatic push when Donald Tusk and Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited Serbia to push Vučić a bit, but it didn't succeed," he said. "Now, for the first time, the EPP has issued a sharply worded statement saying that a member of the EPP should not be attending a parade in Moscow."

The EPP is the largest group in the European Parliament. Its willingness to discipline an associate member signals that the political cost of protecting Vučić has risen above the benefit of keeping Serbia's ruling party inside the centre-right tent. Tonino Picula, the Parliament's rapporteur for Serbia, put it plainly: "The biggest obstacle to Serbia's progress is precisely the nature of its government, personified by Aleksandar Vučić. We simply cannot accept a wish list from Belgrade while its behaviour, like the Serbian president's recent appearance at Putin's military parade in Moscow, sends the opposite message."

Money talks: €111 million frozen

Words have been followed by a concrete financial consequence. Under the Western Balkans Growth Plan, Serbia was allocated €111 million in pre-accession assistance contingent on a Reform Agenda with specific benchmarks for 2027. Those benchmarks include amendments to media law, the appointment of new members to the media regulator (REM), and a revision of the voter registry. Serbia has met none of them.

Montenegro, Albania and North Macedonia have all satisfied their Reform Agenda obligations and received their tranches. Serbia is the sole Western Balkan candidate left empty-handed. "The European Commission is hoping the Reform Agenda will compel Serbian authorities to finally act on EU integration, since the process has been stalled for three years," Štiglija explained. The freeze is the first time the Growth Plan's conditionality has bitten.

Commission caught between process and politics

Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos met the students during their three-day programme in Brussels. She has previously stated that their demands align with the Commission's own requirements for Serbia, and that the Novi Sad tragedy would not have occurred if the rule of law had been respected. Yet the Commission's formal position remains procedural: it monitors, it reports, it conditions funding. It does not intervene in domestic politics.

Slovenian MEP Irena Joveva, who sits on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, argued that silence is no longer an option. "European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen won't be able to stay silent forever," Joveva said. "I told her that ignorance kills, literally kills. Now the pressure is also on her, because this is a fight for the European values she is supposed to represent." The Commission's credibility on enlargement, already strained by the perception that it tolerates backsliding in member states, faces a parallel test in candidate countries.

The election question

After months of internal debate, the student plenums have converged on a single demand: parliamentary elections by mid-May. They have also announced their intention to field their own electoral list, though the mechanics, registration thresholds, coalition rules, media access, remain undefined. The EU has not endorsed a snap election. Officials and MEPs privately acknowledge that the electoral conditions criticised by the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in its 2023 report, media bias, pressure on voters, misuse of state resources, have not improved.

"It's not our responsibility or right, nor will we try, to interfere in internal politics," Joveva said. "But we do support them in a fight that is also the EU's fight. And I truly believe, expect and demand, as do many others, that electoral conditions are fair, because that is the foundation of democracy itself." The ODIHR recommendations, which include depoliticising the election administration and ensuring equitable media coverage, remain the benchmark the EU uses to judge any future vote.

A generation that refuses to leave

At the Berlaymont, Dragana Stanojković watched her daughter Dunja, a veterinary student from Pančevo, arrive with the runners. "We hope for a better life in Serbia, that our children won't have to leave the country and that we'll bring democracy back to Serbia," she said. The sentence captures the demographic stakes. Serbia has lost an estimated 300,000 people to emigration since 2010, many of them young and educated. The students running to Brussels are the ones who stayed.

Their presence in the EU quarter forced a conversation that Brussels has preferred to conduct through progress reports and technical benchmarks. Picula framed the stakes in institutional terms: "You can't have a credible enlargement policy that doesn't lead to real change in the countries knocking on Europe's door, especially Serbia, which, due to its size and importance, may be the most critical candidate country in the Western Balkans. That's why how we approach Serbia now matters for the future of enlargement."