On 25 October, Serbia’s Student List won 52.5 percent of the vote and a majority in parliament. Voter turnout was 68.8 percent, the highest since Serbia’s dictator Slobodan Milošević fell in 2000. Aleksandar Vučić, who had run the country for 14 years as president, conceded that night.
Most coverage treats this as a story about an election, but it is also a story about free speech: how a regime silenced a country without formally banning anything, and how a movement with no party, no television channel, and no formal leader empowered people to speak up again.
I co-founded a pro-democracy movement in Serbia when I was 25 years old and now teach a course on democratic leadership at Georgetown University. For the last two years, as a founding member of the Serbian Diaspora Assembly, I worked with groups inside my home country and helped organize Serbians abroad to vote. What follows is my account of the latest developments in Serbia.
Censorship without A Censor
Serbia had no censor’s office. It did not need one. Speech was free only on paper. The regime, led by Vučić, simply made it expensive. How so?
Speak up and you could be detained for a few days and released without charge. In a single week in July 2025, more than 400 people were taken in.
Speak up, and you could lose your job: more than a hundred school employees lost their posts or contracts after backing the students, and university professors went unpaid for months.
Speak up and the tabloids and national broadcasters, which spoke with one voice dictated by the President, would spend a week calling you a traitor, a foreign mercenary, a terrorist, or an anti-Serbian agent.
Speak up, and men might come out of the ruling party’s local office with baseball bats, as they did in Novi Sad in January 2025, or a car might drive into the crowd you were standing in.
And if you kept speaking up, your phone might be next: Citizen Lab confirmed Pegasus spyware on the phone of the rector of Belgrade University six days before the vote.
These are just snapshots of the last two years. But none of this was new. It was inherited.
In 1998, the Milošević government passed an information law that let it fine independent media into bankruptcy for spreading “fear, panic and defeatism.” The information minister working alongside Milsovic who ran that system was a young man named Aleksandar Vučić. He learned then what he applied for the next three decades as President: you do not have to kill people to silence them. You have to make their lives miserable enough, publicly enough, that everyone else concludes its best to stay quiet.
That conclusion is self-censorship, and it is the most common form of censorship in the world. No law imposes it, and no one is arrested for it, so it never appears in any report. It is simply what happens when people decide, one by one, not to say what they think, because they have seen what it cost the last person who did.
Why Power Takes It Personally
We are all for free speech in theory. The real test comes when someone says something so far against your most important values that you react emotionally: you get angry, and you feel the urge to strike back.
Most of us can only strike back with words. A person with power can strike back with whatever the system puts in their hands: the police, the media, the tax inspector, the men with the bats, the ability to take away someone’s job or their dignity. Their anger is carried by every television channel. The police read it as instruction. The thugs read it as permission. What would be bad temper in a private citizen becomes, in a head of state, a system of punishment.
In research I am conducting at Georgetown University (in collaboration with the Democracy and Governance Department) on how power affects leaders in times of heightened uncertainty and transition, one pattern keeps appearing: the less secure the person, the less able they are to separate themselves from their role, and the more they experience disagreement as a personal attack.
Serbia was a textbook case. Criticize the government or Vučić, and you had attacked Serbia; criticize Serbia, and you had attacked Vučić. The two had been fused until speech against either was considered treason against both. And because every punishment was carried out in public, each one was also a lesson. The rest of the country watched and learned what disagreement would cost.
Pockets of Free Speech
The students’ achievement was not that they spoke. Plenty of brave people had spoken and been crushed. It was that they built a community in which the price of speaking fell far enough that ordinary people could afford it.
They did it first with structure. Every decision went through plenums, open assemblies at each faculty where anyone could speak, and everyone voted. A student who argued and lost still owned the outcome, because she had been heard. Inside a country that had forgotten what that felt like, the plenums were a free-speech culture rebuilt in miniature.
The same structure protected people. There was no formal leader to arrest, bribe, or smear. Correspondents called the movement leaderless; it was the opposite. Leadership was an action anyone could take rather than a position one person or personality held, which is why it spread to farmers, professors, lawyers, scholars, and ordinary citizens who organized themselves the way the students had.
We did the same in the Serbian diaspora. Nobody told us to. A movement without a central formal authority creates space for leadership to emerge everywhere, because permission to lead no longer depends on someone authorizing you.
Only two things mattered: are you doing something for the common cause of setting Serbia free, and are you practicing the democracy you claim you want to bring to the country? When the regime tried to decapitate the movement, it kept finding more heads. When prosecutors jailed six Novi Sad activists for two months on charges of plotting against the constitutional order, thousands blockaded the courthouse to demand their release, and the accused were eventually pardoned. Retaliation against one person no longer frightened the rest. It mobilized them.
Then they did it with their feet. When television would not cover them, they walked, city to city and village to village, into the regions where people read in tabloids claiming they were terrorists. Students sat in strangers’ kitchens and answered questions. Grandmothers who had believed the broadcasts cooked and fed them.
Eighty students cycled more than 1,300 kilometers to Strasbourg; 21 more ran a relay of nearly 2,000 kilometers to Brussels, and every town on the route turned out to meet them. Disinformation works by keeping people apart. It cannot survive a conversation, especially one-on-one.
And they did it with discipline. For two years they answered aggression with calm and, often, with humor; an official’s insult became a banner at the next rally. Nonviolence denied the regime the confrontation it needed to justify a crackdown. Solidarity made the crackdowns that came anyway survivable. Someone would collect your children. Someone would find you a lawyer. Someone would walk you home to ensure you are safe.
Students and citizens created pockets of free speech with their actions and communities, a place where the regime’s influence on free speech diminished. The more people joined and spoke up, the more the house of cards started falling apart, and the fear and self-censorship started to weaken.
The Hungarian Echo
Six months earlier, Hungarians removed the authoritarian Viktor Orbán after 16 years, also with record turnout and against a captured media system. But the cases differ. Hungary’s change came through a conventional party with a charismatic leader; Serbia’s came through a movement that refused to have one leader. But the common thread holds: when enough citizens talk to one another directly, media capture stops working, and the price of speech falls.
What Comes Next
The new majority that won on October 25 has inherited a captured public broadcaster, a security service that bought Pegasus and, as one of Serbia’s weekly newspapers, Radar, revealed this week, had bugged the paper’s editor and two of its journalists for months and read the emails of prosecutors investigating the canopy collapse, and a tabloid industry fed by state advertising.
Dismantling that propaganda anti-free speech machine without building a new one will take years, and it will be the first test of whether this was a change of government or a change of system. The hope is that the momentum and organization the students built will continue as the change of guard happens.
One thing is clear: in a sense, the students had won before a single vote was counted. They showed a country that had learned to stay quiet that community and collective action can protect free speech even when the full power of the state comes after you if you speak up.
Laws matter, and Serbia might need several new ones. But the strongest answer to censorship is a culture of free speech so deep in society and in individuals that it always finds a way to surface and resurface.
Nikola Ilić is the founder and CEO of ChangeLab and teaches democratic leadership at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He co-founded a pro-democracy movement in Serbia at 25, is a founding member of the Serbian Diaspora Assembly, and is a founding member of the World Liberty Congress.