A year after student protests that shook Valjevo: Serbia at a crossroads

The video lasts only a few seconds. A man lies on a street in Valjevo, a city about 90km (56 miles) southwest of the capital, Belgrade. Several police officers surround him, striking him as he lies on the ground.

The footage became one of the most recognisable pieces of evidence of police violence during student-led protests that shook Serbia.

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It was August 14, 2025.

In the year since, the protests have grown into a mass movement challenging the longstanding political dominance of President Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s leader of more than a decade, who has sought to balance close ties with Moscow with the country’s declared path towards the European Union.

Blockades spread across the country. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets. And students moved beyond their initial demands for accountability over the collapse of a concrete canopy at Novi Sad railway station in November 2024, which killed 16 people, and began calling for political change.

Deep trauma

Valjevo is a place where one can measure how much Serbia has changed and how far the student movement is prepared to go.

“Valjevo, in every sense, experienced a deep trauma that night,” says Darija Rankovic, editor-in-chief of Kolubarske.rs, a news portal, who has followed the city’s political and social life for years.

She recently became the target of a public smear campaign after media outlets close to the government accused her of “bringing down the state”.

“When you experience such a coordinated attack on national television, followed by the most vulgar insults about your physical appearance and shameless lies about ‘extortion’, ‘blackmail’ and ‘bringing down the state’, it is natural for your sense of personal and professional security to collapse,” Rankovic says.

According to her, independent journalists are in an extremely dangerous position.

“When the highest-ranking state officials and their media mouthpieces fuel conflicts and label journalists as ‘enemies’ or ‘destroyers of the state’, they are deliberately putting a target on the forehead of all of us who are simply doing our jobs in the public interest,” she told Al Jazeera.

‘The students awakened an enormous energy’

But she has no intention of retreating in the face of threats. She will once again cover an anniversary rally in Valjevo on Friday.

“The consequences of that social rupture and the erosion of trust are still being felt in everyday life, a year later,” Rankovic said.

Police said the use of force was lawful and came after citizens attacked officers, arguing that there had been no other way to restore public order.

Tomislav Markovic, a Belgrade-based writer who has followed Serbia’s political and social landscape for years, recalled that the day after the protests and police violence, masked attackers vandalised another cafe in Valjevo, injured a female employee, then stormed an auto repair shop and physically assaulted its owner and customers.

No one was held accountable, Markovic said, directly blaming Vucic and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), who have been in power for 14 years.

“The students awakened an enormous energy that had been suppressed for years in people who had been languishing under Aleksandar Vucic’s regime – hopeless, depressed and inactive, convinced that nothing would ever change,” Markovic said.

The students now blocking universities and demanding a different society were between seven and 12 years old when Vucic came to power.

“They have had the opportunity to see nothing but the arrogance, plunder, violence and cruelty of the ruling Progressives,” Markovic said.

Yet he warned that nationalist symbols and rhetoric have become increasingly visible within the student movement.

Old signs of Serbia’s nationalist repertoire have resurfaced, including references to “sacred Serbian lands” – rhetoric that Serbia’s neighbours, above all Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Montenegro, perceive as a threat.

This has contributed to the disillusionment of many more liberal citizens and has weakened some of the strong support the students initially enjoyed across the region.

While a fundamental political and ideological transformation of Serbia remains difficult to imagine, Markovic said the most important step would be to remove Vucic and the SNS from power.

‘I am still with the students’

Aida Corovic, a human rights activist, has stood by the students since the beginning of their protests. Among other acts of solidarity, she cooked food for them for months.

But she does not accept their views uncritically.

“I am still with the students. They are the largest and most serious alternative to Aleksandar Vucic’s regime. But precisely because of that, I cannot close my eyes to developments that could harm them and ultimately destroy them,” she said.

She argued that the movement cannot be detached from the society in which the students grew up – one shaped by nationalist propaganda and the legacy of the 1990s wars.

“They grew up in an extremely nationalist environment,” she said.

As someone who witnessed the conflicts of the nineties, Corovic said she knows where flirting with nationalism can lead.

At the same time, she cautioned against generalising, arguing that the majority of students remain democratically oriented and have no nationalist or right-wing ambitions.

According to her, Valjevo has become a symbol of a broader problem: the state’s relationship with protesting citizens, and the question of whether Serbia is capable of ensuring accountability for police conduct.

As long as the movement was demanding accountability for the collapse of the railway station canopy, people with very different political views can stand beneath the same umbrella. But once a movement begins to seek power, she said, it can no longer avoid the question of what kind of Serbia it wants to build.