Srdanovic Leads Student List, Third on Ballot

The Republic Election Commission (RIK) unanimously certified the Student List, “students winning,” on Monday evening, September 15. The session opened at 8:25 p.m., and all 19 members present voted in favor of certification. For the early parliamentary elections on October 25, the list will appear as number three on the ballot.

RIK member Marija Jovanovic opened the session by announcing the final signature count.

The total number of legally valid signatures submitted by the students is 69,099.

Jovanovic added that the list meets the legal requirements on gender representation and that all required documentation submitted with it had been assessed as legally valid. At the same session, the commission also adopted a decision appointing a member and a deputy member to its expanded composition, at the proposal of the list’s submitter.

Srpske vesti had reported that the RIK’s decision on this list was expected by September 16. As it turned out, the commission convened a day earlier than announced. The signatures had been handed in the previous evening, after being collected across Serbia over the weekend, with people in some places waiting more than six hours to sign. The Archive of Public Gatherings estimated that, at the moment the signatures were submitted that evening, around 6,000 people were in front of the Rectorate building, while roughly 8,700 more were in the procession heading toward the Commission’s building. Trumpet players greeted the students outside the RIK.

After the certification, the list also published its roster of 250 candidates for parliament, which it says grew out of more than a year of plenums, blockades and collective decision making.

Who is leading the list

The top spot on the list went to Ilija Srdanovic, a cardiologist who had not previously been part of public political life. He was born on August 7, 1970, in Novi Sad, and finished elementary school and gymnasium in Vrbas. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Novi Sad in 1995, completed his specialization in internal medicine in 2001 and his subspecialization in cardiology in 2004. He earned his master’s degree at the Faculty of Medicine in Belgrade in 2010 and his doctorate in Novi Sad in 2012.

He has worked at the Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases of Vojvodina in Sremska Kamenica since 1997. He has taught at the Faculty of Medicine in Novi Sad since 2018 and has held the title of full professor since 2025. In June 2026, he was a candidate of a group of independent doctors for director of the Serbian Medical Chamber.

He described to 021.rs what topping the list means to him.

As proud as I actually am, that is how much of a great obligation it creates for me.

He also spoke about the pressure he says candidates on the list are facing, without naming anyone specifically.

All of us are ready to make every possible sacrifice to reach our goal, which is the liberation of society. If that sacrifice means that I, or anyone else on the list, gets targeted by people who have no morals, no rights, no integrity or any other form of human dignity, then let that be the price.

He added that the list does not respond to attacks individually.

We do not look back at those who do not matter. What matters to us is Serbia, and the program the students have put together.

Asked what the list’s first move would be if it won the elections, Srdanovic answered in two words: justice and the law.

On the canopy of the Novi Sad railway station, the symbol that has accompanied the rise of the student movement, he said its meaning reaches far beyond the place where it stood.

But that canopy is simply a far stronger and greater symbol than one city, one person or one railway station.

He describes himself, the portal Istinomer reported, as essentially a soldier his whole life: first a conventional soldier with a rifle in hand, mobilized during the war, and later a soldier in his profession, fighting for his patients’ lives.

Number three on the ballot

According to Srdanovic, candidates on the list are under pressure, but in his statements so far he has not named specific people or media outlets he blames for it, so this article does not include a response from them.

Ahead of October 25, when Serbia votes for the new convocation of the National Assembly, the Student List is putting forward, for the first time, a man the public has not known as a political figure but as a doctor from the Faculty of Medicine in Novi Sad. Under number three on the ballot, his name will appear on election material for the first time, not just on a medical diploma.