Day: October 27, 2026

Sunday’s election marked a turning point in Serbia, with the ruling SNS party of Aleksandar Vučić handed a resounding defeat by a student movement that capitalized on mounting public anger over years of corruption and criminality.

Many of those abuses had been exposed by KRIK, an award-winning Serbian investigative outlet and OCCRP partner that has spent years covering the country’s criminals, its corrupt officials, and the connections between them. In return, its young journalists have withstood pressure most people can scarcely imagine: personal attacks by pro-government tabloids, an endless stream of lawsuits, and even death threats.

Now, a new era is dawning. The seemingly unbreakable control exercised by Vučić — who served as information minister under dictator Slobodan Milošević — has been broken.

In this interview, KRIK editor-in-chief Stevan Dojčinović reflects on what the last few days have meant for him, how the students did it, and what challenges lie ahead. As he spoke with OCCRP late at night, the sounds of celebration filtered in from the street.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Stevan, what was it like on election day?

First of all, I didn’t expect this. I’ve never experienced such energy on the street. It was so high energy, like everybody was happy. And you couldn’t find any Vučić supporters.

Clearly, people were [openly] supporting the students, which was not the case before. Because, you know, Vučić was putting pressure on the media, and even on what people tweeted. So people were not really free to talk. But now, I went to my hometown, and there was all this energy in the street, and everything was bright.

When I went to the voting site with my mother, I talked with the guys who were controlling the voting on the student side, and they showed me the numbers, and they were huge. I was there around noon, and an insane number of people had already turned out.

In the end, almost 70 percent voted. There was never a case like this. Basically, Vučić can’t reach any new voters, so he was always fighting not to have a big turnout. So when it went up to 50 percent, you know, and then up to 70, it was done. It was completely clear.

But I thought, and everybody was expecting, that he wouldn’t give up so easily. My idea was that he would do his best to rig the elections. Even with these big numbers, I thought he would just rig more and declare victory.

And I thought, if this happened, it would be a nightmare. People would be on the street, and there would be violence, and somebody could die.

When the electoral places were shut down, it was going in this direction. Because suddenly, Vučić started bringing a lot of armored riot police to the center of Belgrade. And, in parallel, which was a really bad signal, he started bringing these thugs, these criminals who protect him. They were coming in big numbers to meet in this park in front of the presidential building.

And then it turned out that he lost by so much — like, half-a-million votes. And nobody can rig half-a-million. So, I believe what happened is that he figured out that nothing would work.

When he started the press conference on election night, did you think he was about to say that he had really won?

Yeah, I was expecting he would say he won, because of how the police and the hooligans [had been brought out]. But he immediately said, we lost. And when I heard this, I literally couldn’t believe it. Is this really happening? Is he serious?

But it was real. And yet I didn’t even feel happy. I felt empty. I was like: Why do I not feel any euphoria?

People started gathering in big numbers in the center of my hometown to celebrate. In every town, the whole center was full of people. I was going there to meet friends and celebrate. But I still had this kind of weird feeling. I really couldn’t enjoy it fully.

I realized, I must have developed some PTSD. You know like when you’re kidnapped, and then you flee. And you can’t really celebrate and enjoy it. I was  like, okay, I need to process all of these 10 years of what was fucking going on and what he did to us.

And, it was not only me. It’s interesting. Everyone who was around my age or older, it’s the same story. Especially for the people who fought against [Slobodan] Milošević in the 90s. They were like, I’m so empty. I feel like a victim who escaped, you know?

So I thought, I need to process all of this shit. What happened during Vučić, what he did to us, and to journalists in general. It has been such a big trauma. I think he did it to the whole nation.

Part of it is that he was always present. He was appearing on TV all the time. He was everywhere and putting pressure on everyone. Before the protests started [in 2024], that last year was really heavy. People were afraid to speak.

But in the morning, I was finally okay. I woke up and I was happy.

How’s the newsroom? Are your colleagues at KRIK relieved, now that the pressure on you guys will ease?

All of us are happy. But we also feel like we’re in a parallel timeline. It’s like, is this real?

We’re sitting in our office and talking freely. For 10 years, our rule was never to discuss any important stories in the office, because we understood that the secret service was spying on us all the time. We didn’t trust our office, it could have bugs. Usually we would go out to some place where we felt safe to discuss things.

I never trusted my apartment in Belgrade. I was censoring what I could say in there. Because, I knew my apartment was definitely bugged. So you never really had a safe space where you could even talk.

But, today, we can just sit, and we can really communicate in our office. It’s a completely different life than yesterday. And that was our first journalistic day of working in freedom.

KRIK was founded in 2015. We were founded in Vučić’s time. And, every day we worked, it was in Vučić’s time. So now we’ll see what it’s like to work in freedom, which is something we never really had. So, it’s strange now, for everyone, this is new, new, new.

If you had to boil down the reason for people’s dissatisfaction with Vučić, would you say corruption was the main thing?

Yeah. He was connected to organized crime, but corruption was the first thing. You could feel the corruption, that’s the thing.

Because people couldn’t get any jobs. Only members of his party could get jobs. People couldn’t start their own businesses. The financial inspectors would come and shut them down. But the party people can open businesses. So, people could really feel the corruption.

Unfortunately, too, a lot of people died. When this rail station [in the city of Novi Sad] collapsed, people died.

People didn’t just feel that they were losing money, that they weren’t living a good life. They saw people die, and that everybody who lives in Serbia could have been standing in that spot. In the end, they thought, we’re going to die because these people are stealing money.

What did the student movement do? Is it correct to call them a student movement? Because, obviously, it’s not just students.

Yeah, it’s not just students. Besides them, professors deserve credit, scientists, journalists, many others. But, still, the students were at the center of it. They’re the ones who started it.

And, they’re the ones who now have a chance to make a political change. So, I mean, I still call it the students.

Why do you think they succeeded? What happened this time that was different?

I mean, there was no student movement before. When they started two years ago, they succeeded. The ones who didn’t succeed were the [traditional] opposition [parties in Serbia].

I think this is a really good model for the world. It’s cool that, after Hungary, we have this in Serbia, a second big victory against the populist powers. I think that other populists are scared. I saw the tweets of AfD, the very extreme right-wing German party. They were tweeting, ‘now we lost Vučić. We need to rethink how we operate.’ This was their reaction to what happened in Serbia.

So, I think this is a really good model. What you need is to have completely clean, uncompromised people. And part of [the problem in Serbia was] that the whole opposition were ‘old people’ — not by age, but people who already had some level of power. And they lost and then they tried to compete against Vučić.

There were also a lot of connections between them. People felt that it was the same group of people. People understood that it’s not just about changing Vučić, you need to change the whole system. And they never felt the opposition were the ones [to do it].

The opposition was really lousy. They never really went outside of Belgrade. They didn’t visit many Serbian villages — somewhere where you need to go to win. They were very elitist, which people didn’t like. And some people from the opposition were already in power, and had some scandals. So over the years, it looked like the opposition didn’t really have the power to take down Vučić.

And then what happened is that the students were young, without any experience in politics, and completely clean. They didn’t have any history, any scandals. So the citizens trusted them. This was the first element that was really important: To have some new, fresh faces.

The second element was that the students had this idea of unity, that all ideologies and politics should be put to the side. We needed now to have only one goal: to take down this corrupt and criminalized government.

This is so powerful. And I agree with this, because also as a journalist, I believe that corruption is the first problem. And then we can talk: Are you in the center, more to the right, more to the left? Don’t do it now.

Vučić was always trying to put them in a position to voice their opinions on different topics, because he knew that he needed to narrow them down. But if you look at their program, their program is anti-corruption. That’s it. And everything else we will deal with later.

I’ve seen some people from abroad commenting that they don’t have anything in their program about how they’re going to deal with Russia.

Russia, the EU, literally nothing. But that was super smart, because that’s the only way to gather so much support. I think that was maybe the most important element.

And the third element was that the students were very open to learning. They know that they’re new. They don’t have much experience. But they were communicating. They were calling journalists, civil society organizations, everyone they could find who had some expertise, and asking them about how things work.

That was really important. We’ve never witnessed such a perfectly executed system of monitoring the polls. The students managed to cover all the voting places in Serbia. And the monitors did perfect work. They caught a lot of people who were trying to carry out some abuses.

They are not self-taught, they were getting help from other organizations who had expertise in this. I would say that these three elements for me are a kind of model, which managed to bring such a huge, huge victory.

You mentioned that the established opposition would stay in Belgrade and not go to the villages. Did the students make an effort to go to smaller places? I remember that was also a big deal in Hungary, with Péter Magyar’s campaign.

Yeah, that’s the fourth element … the students, they had a campaign called “a student in every village.”

And Vučić, of course, put a lot of lies about the students, saying that they work for the Secret Service and this and that. But when you see them going to the villages and talking with the grannies, with peasants, with farmers, when you have this real life experience, that really changed people and helped them to earn huge support.

I think that was one of the main focuses of their campaign. More than doing stuff in Belgrade. Belgrade is easy. You have the most progressive people, and it’s easier to win. You don’t need to really be there.

So that’s one way of defeating a situation where the media is controlled by the government — you have to reach people in person, because otherwise the only thing they hear is the pro-government media.

Yeah, exactly. But usually, nobody will do that.

The typical opposition in Europe is complaining about social media. They complain that they cannot reach people because of these troll campaigns, but they will not actually go [in person]. But you really need to go to every village.

And that’s nothing new. That’s like old school politics, right? We just have to literally get back to the ways of how politics was done, and not allow social media to make you lazy.

The social media algorithms will always boost content that helps populists, right? All the hate speech, the anti-immigrant things, will always be pushed. So you have to literally meet people and talk. We in KRIK have a bit of experience, because we do a lot of crowdfunding, we have connections with our audience. So we understood how important it is to do that stuff.

So I hope, at least in Europe and the U.S., politics will return to this old-school way a little bit.

Turning to the future, what do you expect will happen now?

Now we have a lot of work to do. Now comes the really tough period. I think it’s important to learn from history.

There’s a chance to change things, but Vučić left a really strong system. All the big businesses, the whole economy is in the hands of his oligarchs. Organized crime is powerful. So this will not be easy.

And we need to learn from what happened in the past. After Milošević was gone, [reformist Prime Minister Zoran] Đinđić was killed two years later, basically by a joint venture of the Secret Service and organized crime, because they didn’t want to allow the country to reform.

So we can celebrate tonight, but tomorrow it’s the beginning of a really big job. Now it’s really important that everyone really does their part of the work. We as journalists should continue to investigate.

I believe it will happen like in Milošević’s time — as we speak now, they’ll start destroying evidence and documents, bribing witnesses. In the next three months, we’re in a defining period where we need to discover as much as we can. And when the students constitute the assembly and the government, I hope that they’ll start prosecuting these people.

But it won’t be easy. Now the very difficult part is coming.

Who are the main entrenched forces that have to be defeated? Is it the security services? Is it organized crime?

Yes, the security services are one of the most difficult parts. And I think that was the biggest mistake [in the past].

[Đinđić] didn’t ever really reform them. He basically just changed the bosses and kept on working with them. And in the end, they were the part of the group that killed him.

I think the students will do much stronger, deeper reforms, because the secret service we have now have been inherited from Tito and Milošević’s time. The people change, of course, but in a way it’s the same structure, even with older people bringing their sons and daughters into the service.

It’s kind of like the state within the state. When they say “deep state,” it really does work that way in Serbia. I think they’ll be able to really cut and reform it completely, which is important.

The second really difficult part is that it’s easy to remove the director of this or that state-owned company, or change ministers. But I’m really afraid about what will happen with the judiciary. Because this is a kind of a trick that Vučić performed with the judiciary. He adopted all the EU laws that offer really big protection to prosecutors and judges, so that they cannot be touched by politics. But the catch is he put his people in there. So what will happen now? Whoever comes, he’ll really have a hard time changing the corrupt judges and prosecutors, because they’re so protected that only the prosecutions and judges can change themselves. You will need to find a way to really clean them. I think you will need to kind of work with them. That will be really a hard thing to do.

Then, another really hard thing will be the Vučić oligarchs. They bought everything in Serbia. If you go from my office to the center of Belgrade, literally along the main street, and you look right and left, 90 percent of the businesses that you see — doesn’t matter if it’s a small coffee shop or some big company selling computer equipment — everything is owned by his people. In these 14 years, they bought everything, and they all opened businesses because they were harassing everybody who’s not part of his party to prevent them from opening any business.

So now the question is, you take power, but the whole economy is in the hands of his people. There it will also be really hard to find a solution.

Of course, they will prosecute these people and they can seize their illegal money, but there’ll be a lot of actual legal businesses still in the hands of his people. So he will go, but after so many years, everything from the business structure, secret services, judiciary, are [run by] his people.

Is it just about taking out his people and replacing them with your people? Don’t you have to change something about the rules of the game?

Yes, the point is to change the rules, not just replacing people. That’s why people didn’t like the [old] opposition. The opposition defeated Milošević and put in their people, who could be better than Milošević’s people, but the system still worked to their advantage, not for society.

So the whole idea of the students is that they will really try to change the system, which means not putting in our people to serve us, but trying to make the country really work. And I think they have a chance to do it for one simple reason — because they don’t have their own people. They’re just students.

We won’t have a government with all students. Now that they won the election, they gathered a list of people [to become members of parliament]. And none of them are actually students. They gathered different experts and professors. And many of them are not connected to the students. They were just picking people who they believe are clean.

It was really amazing because everything was built on trust that all of the students are honest and not corrupted. That’s very powerful. If they use this model to change the system, that will work. I believe they will scan the system and pick the best people. There were still good people in the police. In every place, there are still good professional people. So I hope the students will recognize these people, who are not tied to them, and help them actually reach the top positions.

It will be based on a clean foundation. That’s the kind of thing that I’m relying on most.

What about the criminal groups? They were heavily embedded in the Vučić regime. You’ve done a lot of reporting on that. Are they scared now? Are they running? Are they going to fight?

They will do what they always do. They will not run. I believe the criminals are now thinking of finding a way to approach the students. I believe they will not succeed, but that’s how criminals work. They don’t care, in the end, for Vučić.

But I need to say, this is really funny to see. So like I said, last night Vučić brought these strong police forces to the center of Belgrade, and all of these hooligans and criminals, a really big number of them, to this park next to the presidential building.

And in the moment when he declared defeat on TV, and people started gathering in the center of town to celebrate, there is a video, the criminals who in the moment start running, you know, and you have like tens of them just running, literally running from this park. They’re only strong when they have protection, and when the police are working with them.

You sound pretty optimistic, because it seems like you really trust the students, is that fair to say?

I trust the students because I completely trust their intentions, in those terms I’m optimistic. But I’m realistic in what’s going to happen now, it will be really hard.

Like I said, you need to reform entire structures — the oligarchs, the money side, the secret services, crime. I know they have good intentions, but it’s really hard to do it. We need to remember that Đinđić died and failed.

And the second thing, I’m really afraid what would happen — this also happened in the time after Milošević, when the democratic [forces] won — I think that we will feel in the following years a lot of the damage which Vučić did to the economy. I think it will be a hard period.

And I’m afraid of how people usually react — everywhere, not just in Serbia — if the economy isn’t perfect in two years, which is completely logical because we just now see how much devastation he left, if people aren’t happy in a year or two, they will not be able to make the connection to Vučić, they’ll most likely then blame the new power in Serbia.

And that was how Vučić came to power the first time, right? Taking advantage of disappointment with the democratic generation before him.

Exactly. They needed to deal with the country left by Milošević, which was under sanctions and embargos and completely devastated. But people will say, the ones now in power are the ones to blame. So I think this is a big danger.

The problem is also that journalists need to change how they operate. I don’t think we can do old-school journalism anymore. So I think journalists can help, but also we need to find other ways to communicate these things and inform the audience. There’s a lot of fighting to be done.

But literally everything changed — the atmosphere on the streets. Before the protests there was this kind of this dark atmosphere, cynical and dark, like there was no hope. Now it’s like living in a completely different country. It is insane and very refreshing.

Source: OCCRP · 2026-10-27