Dveri Skip Election, Back Student List

The Main Board of the Serbian Movement Dveri unanimously decided not to run in the parliamentary election scheduled for October 25, 2026, and to place the party’s entire campaign infrastructure at the disposal of the Student List. The movement made the decision public on Tuesday morning, September 11, and the news portal 021 was first to report it, at 7:45 a.m.

Accounts of exactly how the decision was made differ. N1 reports that it was the Dveri Presidency that voted to hand the movement’s capacities over to the students, for use in the campaign “for the parliamentary and presidential elections whenever they are called,” without naming a specific date. Serbian News Media, on the other hand, attributes the decision not to run to the Dveri Main Board and ties it directly to the parliamentary election set for October 25.

Dveri says the support comes with no conditions attached. The statement says the movement is giving the Student List its offices across Serbia, along with experience and technical help collecting and filing election paperwork, plus legal assistance with the election procedure itself. Dveri also offered its members and supporters for door to door campaigning, as well as members to staff polling boards in towns and municipalities across Serbia.

“This decision represents a continuation of the support we have given students since the first day of their protests and blockades,” Dveri said in the statement.

The movement is not framing the coming vote as an ideological contest but as a question of survival. The statement calls it an election for Serbia’s survival, not a choice between a left and a right option. With that, Dveri, a party that has spent decades positioned on the right of Serbia’s political scene, is openly throwing its support behind a list built by students in blockade, fielding no list and no candidate of its own on the ballot.

The decision to sit this election out is not a signal that Dveri is leaving electoral politics for good. The movement said it will take part in the first free and democratic election held after a change of government, running on its own platform, which Dveri describes as the best one for Serbia’s future. In other words, the movement frames the current step back as tied strictly to this election cycle, not as abandoning the idea of running on its own in principle.

Dveri also laid out what it expects once the votes are counted. The statement says the movement is convinced the Student List will win, after which the new government in the National Assembly should pass a law holding accountable everyone who, in the movement’s words, has been plundering Serbia over the past 14 years. That goes beyond typical campaign rhetoric and points to a concrete legislative step, though for now it remains only an announcement, with no draft text or timeline attached to it.

Dveri is not the only party that has handed its infrastructure to the Student List in recent weeks instead of running on its own. The Green-Left Front, the Democratic Party, the Movement of Free Citizens and the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina took the same step earlier, as did the movement led by Nis physician Dragan Milic. The list of parties and movements turning their resources over to the students keeps growing week by week, drawing in figures from across Serbia’s existing political divide.

The parliamentary election is set for October 25. That is when it will become clear whether the backing of this many parties and movements, Dveri included, adds up to more than what those same parties collected running on their own lists in previous cycles, and whether a coalition of politically adjacent but not identical forces can hold together through the end of the campaign.