Participation is power: Lessons from Serbia and Brazil

On Sunday, voters in two countries proved that elections can change things. In Serbia, a student movement won a parliamentary election after almost two years of protest. In Brazil, Lula da Silva overturned a first-round defeat to win a fourth term. 

On 1 November 2024, a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad and killed 16 people. What followed was a movement of blockades and student assemblies, without leaders.

When the protests forced an early election, the students did not form a conventional party. They submitted the “Student List” after thousands marched through Belgrade carrying boxes of signatures. 

They campaigned the same way. Their slogan was “Serbia or Mafia”, pointing to corruption and the links between the state and organised crime, and activists reported visiting 170,000 households in 20 days. 

President Vučić’s list held almost all of its voters: about 1.68 million votes in 2026, compared with 1.78 million in 2023. The List on the other hand rose from about 0.90 million votes in 2023 to 2.26 million, and turnout was much higher. They did not win mainly by taking voters from the other side, they managed to bring out many people who had not voted before.

What makes their programme interesting is not only what it contains, but how familiar it sounds elsewhere. Its main points, from education to housing to corruption, could be read as an agenda for many European countries.

On education, French high school students began a movement over under-funded schools, and students in Albania protest over university conditions and costs. Spanish people started to go on the street and camp in Madrid and some other cities, while students in Greece have camped in Syntagma Square, both over rising rents. On corruption, Albania’s movement began with the sale of part of its coastline and the slogan “Albania is not for sale”. And on policing, the Serbian demand to dismiss officers who broke the law against protesters echoes France and Albania.

The mobilisations for democracy based on real demands can lead to a profound political change. It can also work to defend democracy against illiberate forces as we saw in the elections of Brazil on the same day.

Lula lost the first round by 2.2 million votes and won the runoff three weeks later by 4.3 million, becoming the first president to win a fourth term. His campaign went looking for those who had not shown up in the first round. It shifted to the everyday financial struggles of Brazilians, and in the middle of the runoff secured Senate approval for ending the six-day work week which brought more people to the polls in the second round. 

These are different countries, with different histories and different parties, and the problems are not identical. But the pattern is clear. A generation is asking for the same things: schools that work, a home they can afford, institutions that are not for sale, and a say in the decisions that shape their lives. Serbia’s students are the first to turn that list into a programme, and to win an election with it. Now the Serbians need to be able to govern despite wide differences within the movement.