Opposition Splits Into Three Columns Before Election
With less than two months until a possible October 18 or 25 vote, Serbia's opposition enters the race split into three columns, while students hold to their plan to run on their own list.
Opposition parties in Serbia, with less than two months to go before possible early parliamentary elections, are entering the campaign split into at least three columns, while students in blockade hold to their decision to run on their own, independent student list.
President Aleksandar Vucic said on Thursday that parliamentary elections would be held on October 18 or 25, and announced that the exact date would be known in the coming days. For that deadline to be met, elections must be called by September 3 at the latest for the first date, or by September 10 for the second. Serbian law requires that no fewer than 45 and no more than 60 days pass between the calling of a vote and election day itself. The final constitutional deadline for holding regular parliamentary elections is January 2, 2028, but the president has been signaling an autumn vote for weeks and, according to what we have learned, is leaving the decision on the exact date to the last moment.
Vucic has been touring towns and villages across Serbia since early August, promising residents higher pensions, new jobs and fixes to local problems. As Srpske novine has previously reported, it was during one of those visits that he announced the election timeline. The time the opposition has left to make up its mind is now measured in days, not weeks.
Why isn’t the opposition running on a single list?
Unlike previous cycles, when a joint run was the starting assumption, opposition party leaders this time have failed to agree on a single list. The split comes down to disagreement over who should lead the push for change, students or parties, and over whether the pro-European bloc should include actors who are not explicitly pro-European.
The first column is the student list itself. Students in blockade have spent more than a year demanding early parliamentary elections, ever since their demands went unmet after the collapse of a canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad, which killed sixteen people and for which, they say, no one has ever been held accountable. The Democratic Party (DS), led by Srdjan Milivojevic, announced back in May 2025 that it supported the demand and would put all its resources at the student list’s disposal, “without fielding either its own list or a coalition list.” Milivojevic recently reaffirmed that decision, adding that the party would also hand over the polling-board seats it is entitled to by law to the students. The student movement also won backing from Savo Manojlovic’s Kreni-promeni (Move-Change) movement, whose leader said the students’ vision of a corruption-free, ecologically sound Serbia matched his own program.
The second column is the Platform for a European Serbia (PES), founded in June 2026. It brings together Dragan Djilas’s Party of Freedom and Justice, Zdravko Ponos’s SRCE, Pavle Grbovic’s Movement of Free Citizens (PSG) and Goran Jesic’s Civic Movement Solidarity. The parties gathered in PES said the elections “need a clear pro-European option” and that running in that format could help bring down the government. PSG president Pavle Grbovic told Masina that a pro-European list “can certainly count on a respectable number of votes and thereby contribute to an overall win over the regime,” while arguing that cooperation with parties opposed to Serbia’s European Union membership “is neither natural nor necessary.”
PES grew out of the earlier EU5 alliance, formed at the end of 2025 at the premises of the European Movement in Serbia by the Green-Left Front, the People’s Movement of Serbia (NPS), the Party of Freedom and Justice, the Movement of Free Citizens and SRCE, to coordinate policy toward the European Union. That alliance never officially announced a joint run for office, and it fell apart when the Green-Left Front said in May that it would not support the elections even if held in the autumn, regardless of the student list. The Green-Left Front is thus the only major opposition force that will not take part in the vote.
The third column is a possible bloc built around Aleksandar Jovanovic Cuta’s Ecological Uprising, currently in talks with the People’s Movement of Serbia, New Face of Serbia and a citizens’ group led by Dr. Dragan Milic. Leaders of those parties said in early July, at a press conference in the Medijana municipality of Nis, that change in Serbia can only come “together with people who want progress,” and called on all opposition figures and students to unite. Cuta told Masina that Ecological Uprising would decide whether to run only after seeing the student list.
“The only way for Aleksandar Vucic to leave power, for this criminal regime to be removed, is for everyone to stand on one side. I’ve been saying that from the start. There are people who think they can do it alone. Let them first declare themselves, let them say what their politics and program are, so we can see who and what they are, and only then decide on support and whether or not to run in the elections,” Jovanovic Cuta explained.
Inside the People’s Movement of Serbia, that process has not gone smoothly. Djordje Ristic, until recently head of the party’s city board in Vranje, says support for the student list was the point of contention between the party’s central leadership and the local board, a claim the leadership denies. NPS lawmaker Uros Djokic told Masina that former members of the Vranje board had not taken seriously the responsibility that comes with political participation, and that this was why the board was dissolved, without directly addressing the dispute over the student list. He said the episode would not affect the party’s decision on whether to run.
Separately from all three columns, the NADA coalition has also announced it will run, bringing together Milos Jovanovic’s New DSS, the Monarchists and Branimir Nestorovic’s Mi, snaga naroda (We, the Power of the People) movement.
What experts say about the divided opposition
Dejan Bursac, senior research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, told Nova that the opposition’s fragmentation does not necessarily draw votes away from the students, but that it does carry risk.
“I wouldn’t look at it through the lens of splitting votes, because running in elections is entirely legitimate. But the opposition in Serbia has one job, and that’s to make sure that running is done competently and effectively, without the kind of trouble in negotiating and dealmaking we’ve seen in previous years,” Bursac said, adding that it matters that disagreements among the parties stay out of public view, “because all of that sends voters a bad message.”
In his assessment, the opposition should only run if it is confident of clearing the threshold and of actually taking part in political change afterward. Otherwise, Bursac warns, constant infighting or attacks on the students send a bad signal to the public and could dampen voter enthusiasm, not just for the parties but for the very idea of a change in power.
What the polls show
Two polls conducted this summer paint different pictures. A survey carried out in June 2026 by the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) and Stanford University’s Democracy Action Lab found that among decided voters, who make up 70 percent of the electorate, 44.9 percent would back the student list, 35.7 percent the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), and 3.8 percent the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). According to that survey, no opposition party would clear the threshold on its own.
A poll by New Serbian Political Thought (NSPM) gives a different result: 39.6 percent of respondents back the student list, 37.5 percent the SNS list, while the SPS would clear the threshold on its own with 4.9 percent, according to that survey. The same poll found that two possible opposition coalitions would also clear the threshold: a bloc made up of the People’s Movement of Serbia, New Face of Serbia, Ecological Uprising and the Movement for Decentralization with 5.6 percent, and a coalition of the Party of Freedom and Justice, SRCE and the Movement of Free Citizens with 4.2 percent.
The gap between the two surveys shows just how open the outcome of the October vote, should it happen on the announced date, remains for every side. Serbia’s Unified Voters’ Register currently lists 6,439,075 registered voters.
Less than two weeks remain before the deadline for calling elections for October 18 expires. Whether the opposition will settle on a final number of columns by then, or whether party leaders will enter the campaign with lists still being worked out, is a question whose answer has yet to arrive.
