For more than a year, Serbia has been gripped by an unbroken chain of marches, blockades, campus sit-ins, and mass demonstrations. Revolts first erupted in the aftermath of the Novi Sad railway station disaster in November 2024, when 16 people were killed by the collapse of concrete canopy. What started as grief quickly curdled into fury, and that fury has become a permanent feature of Serbian daily life. The streets have not emptied. The chants have not faded. Yet, for all the spectacle and scale, Serbia is no closer to political transformation than it was when students first took to the streets.

Last March, I argued in this magazine that political naivete had hamstrung the protests. They had the numbers but no strategy; they embodied public rage but lacked a plan for converting outrage into change.

For more than a year, Serbia has been gripped by an unbroken chain of marches, blockades, campus sit-ins, and mass demonstrations. Revolts first erupted in the aftermath of the Novi Sad railway station disaster in November 2024, when 16 people were killed by the collapse of concrete canopy. What started as grief quickly curdled into fury, and that fury has become a permanent feature of Serbian daily life. The streets have not emptied. The chants have not faded. Yet, for all the spectacle and scale, Serbia is no closer to political transformation than it was when students first took to the streets.

Last March, I argued in this magazine that political naivete had hamstrung the protests. They had the numbers but no strategy; they embodied public rage but lacked a plan for converting outrage into change.

Ten months on, that assessment still holds true. The opposition has gained no tangible leverage, President Aleksandar Vucic remains firmly in control, and the government has responded to the unrest not with concessions but with pushback. Nevertheless, the protesters have not gone home. Quite the opposite: The movement has grown more entrenched, more confrontational, and increasingly combustible. This pattern warrants a worrying comparison with Ukraine between 2013 and 2014, when a wave of mass civil unrest and revolutionary violence ultimately toppled pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. Is Serbia heading toward its own Euromaidan—a “Serbo-Maidan,” if you will—which could see a similarly bloody turn on the streets of Belgrade?

Although there is still reason to doubt that Serbia’s unrest will escalate so rapidly, it is increasingly difficult to imagine other outcomes. Snap parliamentary elections are expected to take place later this year, but the odds are so stacked in the government’s favor through its domination of domestic media and a robust spoils system that the protest movement is almost certain to face huge disappointment. Whether that leaves the movement deflated or pushes it to more radical measures will make all the difference between the same miserable status quo or a brutal Serbo-Maidan ahead.

To be sure, Vucic—an autocratic kleptocrat often misunderstood to be a right-wing populist—is no stranger to shrugging off demonstrations. Since he was first elected in 2017, hardly a year has passed that hasn’t been marked by mass protests. There were the anti-lockdown protests during the COVID-19 pandemic, the protests against mining giant........

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