By two o'clock on Sunday afternoon, 46% of Serbia's registered voters had already cast a ballot. That is nearly a million more people than had voted by the same hour in December 2023, and it explains why the Serbia election turnout figure, still preliminary, is the story of the day before anyone has counted a single vote.
The numbers come from early reporting, as the BBC's Nick Thorpe reported from Belgrade. Polls close at 8pm local time, and first indications of results are expected about two hours later. Most commentators, by that account, think a final turnout of 65% or more would favour the students.
A movement that grew out of rubble
President Aleksandar Vučić called the snap vote. His Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has held power since 2012, and the election follows two years of street protests set off by the 2024 collapse of a railway station canopy that killed 16 people. For many Serbians the disaster became shorthand for a system in which corruption and neglect go unpunished. Vučić and the SNS reject the corruption charge and deny steering the media.
The opposition is an odd one. The Student List has no famous front-man. Its 250 candidates were chosen at assemblies in university faculties and include doctors, actors, academics and athletes, with Ilija Srdanović, a Novi Sad University professor, at the top. Its programme promises to remove officials who broke the rules while policing protests, keep party loyalists out of public enterprises, and take the state broadcaster out of political hands.
Among those watching the experiment closely is Žarko Korać, who served as a deputy prime minister in an earlier era and has long been a critic of nationalist politics. He described the Student List as unprecedented in modern European history. He also identified its weak point: the candidates scarcely know one another, he said, and no one can predict what kind of government they would form.
Queues, a folk song and fraud claims
Lines formed in big cities and small towns, and abroad too: Ljubljana, Munich, Los Angeles, Chicago. In Paris, voters stood in heavy rain. Near the electoral commission in Belgrade, where police had closed the surrounding streets, drivers wound down their windows and played a folk tune, "I want three kisses". The joke works because the Student List is third on the ballot. Young people danced on the pavement.
The mood elsewhere was darker. Videos shared on social media that morning appeared to show a cafe in Niš where ballots were being filled in ahead of time, the practice known as chain voting, with the papers hidden once people noticed the cameras. There were also reports of attacks on monitors and journalists at several polling stations. None of it has been independently verified, and nobody has said how widespread it was. The students, wary of fraud, have put at least two observers at each of the country's 8,210 voting stations.
Vučić still has real strength. He can't run for a third presidential term, so he is campaigning to return as prime minister, a job he left in 2017. Many voters see him as a firm defender of Serbian interests, and he can point to a decade of economic growth and a good deal of new infrastructure. He has promised higher pensions, higher public sector pay and more health spending. His posters show clasped hands, and the pitch is continuity: finish what we started.
High turnout in a polarised country cuts both ways. A surge can be the sound of an angry public, or of a ruling party's machine doing what it has done for years. Early figures say the room is hot, not who lit the fire.
What happens after the count may matter more than the count itself. Korać said he doubted the students would accept a late-evening victory declaration by Vučić. If the margin is narrow and the fraud allegations stick, Serbia could face a dispute over legitimacy, not just a change of government, two years after a canopy fell and started all this.