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People wave Serbian flags as they gather at a square during a student-led protest and a 18-hour blockade of the streets to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November 2024 collapse of a train station canopy, in the town of Nis, Serbia, March 1, 2025
TENS of thousands of people in Serbia gathered on Saturday for a huge student-led rally to send a message that “we deserve better.”
University students across the Balkan country, which has been ruled firmly by a right-wing government for more than a decade, have been holding protests since a fatal train station canopy collapse in November killed 15 people. Critics have blamed government corruption.
The almost daily demonstrations regularly draw tens of thousands of people and have rattled President Aleksandar Vucic’s hold on power.
The students said in a statement: “We want a system that values knowledge and work, and not obedience and silence.”
Protesters gathered in Nis, some 120 miles south of Belgrade, for Saturday’s festival-style rally, which lasted for 18 hours.
“We rally because we know we deserve better,” the statement said.
The event in Nis passed a symbolic decree that proclaimed the “values for which we fight as a pledge for the future,” and in order to build a state “in which justice and freedom will be stronger than any individual.”
The next major protest will be held in the capital, Belgrade, on March 15, organisers said.
President Vucic has described the protests as a Western-orchestrated attempt to oust him.
