Students Wrap Up Door to Door Campaign Across Serbia

Students in blockade are wrapping up a three-day door-to-door and stand campaign today, August 30, run since August 28 in about twenty municipalities and towns across Serbia. According to a statement carried by blokada.org, the goal was direct conversation with citizens, with no intermediaries and no stage.

It is the first field action of this kind with a precise, pre-published list of locations, and it comes as the authorities are expected to call elections in early September. Srpske vesti previously reported on students searching for empty business premises to collect signatures and on their call for voters from Kosovo to join that effort, making the door-to-door campaign the next field step of the same push.

Where students went between August 28 and 30

The list of locations is wide, spanning both larger towns and small villages. Per the statement, activities were held in Aleksinac, Pirot, Osecina, Blace and Nis, as well as in Vrsac, Backa Palanka, Beocin, the municipality of Zrenjanin, Pozarevac and Rasna near Pozega. The villages of Teocin, Brajici, Leusici and Srezojevci were also on the list.

In Belgrade, the campaign covered six municipalities: Medakovic, Banjica, Borca, Vrcin, Zvezdara and Vracar.

Students also specified exact meeting points in some towns, for instance by the fountain in Aleksinac and at Crveni Trg (Red Square) in Pirot, so citizens could find the stands more easily.

“Victory doesn’t happen in one square, in one day, on a stage in front of a microphone,” Students in Blockade said in the statement, describing the campaign as a series of individual door-to-door conversations that, they said, add up to a broader push ahead of the elections.

A continuation of the campaign that started in August

This is not the organizers’ first action of this kind. In early August, students ran a similar caravan that, according to an earlier statement, went from Grdelica in the south to Raska, passing through Belgrade, Novi Sad and Stara Pazova, with stands also set up in Predejane, Velika Plana, Loznica, Paracin and Bela Palanka, as well as in Belgrade’s Rusanj.

That earlier action also had a precise schedule. Door-to-door visits in Belgrade’s Kaludjerica ran every day from 5 to 8 p.m., while the action in Vracar was scheduled for Saturday, August 8, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. In Stara Pazova, students were out in the field on August 7 from 5:30 to 8 p.m.

An earlier statement on that action also included a line that has since become something of a campaign motto.

“No one is too small, or too far away” to be heard, Students in Blockade said in the statement from that earlier action.

What comes after August 30

Based on the pattern so far, the door-to-door campaign has repeated several times through August, with a new list of towns and villages each time. Organizers have not yet said whether the same model of field work will continue after the elections, expected to be called in early September.

Students closed out the action with a message to everyone they visited over the three days, announcing that they would see everyone, as they put it, “across all of Serbia.”

The geographic reach of this three-day action, from Aleksinac in the south to Backa Palanka in the north, follows the pattern the organizers set back in early August, when their caravan traveled from Grdelica to Raska. That has pushed the number of municipalities and towns where students have physically talked to citizens since the start of the month, based on the lists published so far, up to several dozen.