00:00Welcome back. Serbia's longtime leader Aleksandar Vucic has conceded defeat to a student-led movement in a historic election on
00:09Sunday, ending his party's 14-year grip on power.
00:13Nearly complete results released on Monday show the student list won 53% of the vote against 39% for
00:21Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party.
00:27Tens of thousands of people celebrated in the streets of Belgrade following Vucic's defeat. Voter turnout was close to 70%,
00:35its highest level in more than 30 years.
00:37The feeling is surreal. I laughed, I cried, I screamed, I jumped. It's just unbelievable. After so many years of
00:47this tyranny and dictatorship, we are finally free. And that's, you cannot put it in words.
00:57My heart is going to explode. After two years of punishment of these people, of these young people who got
01:05arrested and beaten, we won. We won. And he lost. And we won by so much that he had to
01:13say that he lost.
01:14The snap elections were called by Vucic in September, after almost two years of student-led demonstrations. Vucic resigned as
01:21president, hoping the vote would clear his path back to power as prime minister.
01:25But it was a grassroots protest movement sparked by an outrage over a construction disaster that became his undoing.
01:31The protests began after a railway station canopy collapsed in 2024, killing 16 people.
01:37Public anger over the disaster grew into a nationwide campaign for accountability and political change.
01:42The student list now faces the task of turning that support into a government.
01:47It has campaigned without a single leader and has yet to name its candidate for prime minister.
01:51This victory for the student-led movement in Serbia will likely reverberate across the European continent,
01:57adding momentum to the youth and student protests against poor education standards and a lack of prospects.
