The student plenum as political format: declaration instead of an electoral list

On bus 26, around noon on Tuesday May 26, two students from the Faculty of Philosophy are talking about a plenum two days earlier. One says: “We are not a party, we do not need to be a list.” The other replies: “But if we are not a list, what are we?” The first one goes quiet for ten seconds, looks out the window, and says: “We are a declaration.” They spent the rest of the bus ride in silence. From that silence, a sociologist does not hear indecision. They hear the weight of a choice just spoken aloud.

The student plenums that have been running across Serbia since late 2024, intensified after the May 23 protest on Slavija that drew more than a hundred thousand people, this morning, according to statements from several plenums, decided to concentrate their political activity on drafting a joint declaration and on new phases of blockades, rather than on forming an electoral list for the autumn parliamentary elections. In media readings, this decision is often presented as a weakness of the movement, an admission that the movement is incapable of moving from a protest logic to an electoral one. A sociologist would have to say the opposite. The decision to choose a declaration, not a list, is a sociologically mature choice that suits the internal nature of the plenum format and that could, paradoxically, be a more effective political instrument than an electoral campaign in Serbia’s 2026 conditions.

To understand this, one must first understand what a plenum is as a political format. A plenum is not a meeting. It is not a party congress either. In a tradition reaching from the Paris Commune of 1871 through the Soviet Petrograd of 1917 to the student occupations at the Sorbonne in 1968 and the Croatian plenum occupations of philosophy faculties in 2009, it is a format in which decisions are made by direct discussion and consensus of all those present, without permanent leadership and without delegation. It is anti-hierarchical by design. Sociologist Erik Olin Wright, in his study “Envisioning Real Utopias” (Verso, 2010), describes such formats as “real utopias,” practices that produce democracy in every act, not just at their output. The plenum format, therefore, is not accidentally non-hierarchical; it is built that way because any hierarchy in it would destroy what the plenum is.

From this follows an important consequence. A plenum movement that transformed itself into an electoral list would have to make a decision structurally opposed to its nature. It would have to choose a leader, set out a programme, take tactical decisions some members would not support, and accept a hierarchy the plenum has rejected in every other context. That would be the self-destruction of the format. Slovenian sociologist and philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in the essay “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously” (Verso, 2012), writes about similar transformations of the Occupy movement of 2011 as “the trap of institutionalisation.” A movement that, at the moment of growth, decides to suffocate itself into a party form loses its political capital before it has been able to use it. The students on the bus on Tuesday talking about whether they are a list or a declaration are voicing, in sociological terms, the most precise possible diagnosis of their situation.

Here I bring in the counter-argument, which is serious in this case and which I must not skip. There is a reading, often heard from people long active in opposition politics, that the students’ decision not to form a list is a political luxury they can afford because they do not bear the consequences. By that logic, the hundred thousand people who came out on Slavija have no electoral expression, the parliament stays as Senjak produced it, the electoral laws change cosmetically, and a movement that refuses to translate into votes refuses to be a serious political factor. The argument has force. I would answer it as follows. The political effect of a movement is not measured solely by the number of mandates. It is measured also by the capacity to change the frame of the debate. A student declaration that would publicly set out five or seven demands, with deadlines and oversight mechanisms, could become the reference document against which every future coalition and every future government is measured. That is no less effective than an electoral list that would win five percent. In many cases, it is more effective.

To whom does the declaration speak, if not to voters

This is where the question opens that the plenums must answer, if they want the declaration not to remain just an academic document. A declaration does not address voters in the traditional sense. It addresses the public sphere, in the sense in which German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, in the book “Structural Changes of the Public Sphere” (1962, Serbian translation Djurdja Strsoglavec, Vladimir Petrovic, V. B. Z. 2012), defined the public as the space in which common standards are shaped through equal argument. A declaration that fails to penetrate that space (because it stays too general, because it does not offer measurable criteria, because it does not provide an oversight mechanism) becomes a declarative declaration, which is an oxymoron. A declaration that succeeds becomes a political instrument without a party. That is a rare phenomenon in the Serbian public sphere, but not impossible. Documents that have functioned this way, in different periods, include the 1986 SANU Memorandum (with all its disputed content) and the 2017 Civic Platform Proposal for Electoral Reform, which obligated participants in the Dialogue on Electoral Conditions to take certain steps.

The students, then, are choosing a format that is rare but sociologically grounded. The second student on the bus asked the right question: if we are not a list, what are we. The first gave an answer that is at once modest and ambitious: we are a declaration. Modest because it does not promise mandates. Ambitious because it promises something harder, to change the standards by which the debate is conducted. If the declaration is concrete, if it contains measurable demands around electoral conditions, the judicial system, the media environment, and if it is sustained over years, it can be what elections never achieved and always promised. It can be a documented framework for accountability. I return to bus 26. As the two students got off at Slavija, one said to the other, already on the pavement: “Let’s write something that would bind us even after the protests.” From that one sentence, a sociologist sees the difference between movements that prepare to vanish when the protests quiet down, and movements that prepare to outlast the moment of their visibility. The plenums that this morning chose a declaration have chosen, it seems to me, the latter side.