Serbia’s prime minister has resigned after weeks of anti-corruption protests prompted by the deadly collapse of a train station roof in the northern city of Novi Sad last year.
Miloš Vučević announced his resignation at a press conference on Tuesday, a decision he said he had made “in order to defuse tensions”. He said the mayor of Novi Sad would also be resigning. “With this we fulfil the political demands of even the most extreme protesters,” Vučević said.
Vučević, in his current post for less than a year, was mayor of Novi Sad for a decade until 2022, during which period a Chinese consortium began renovations on the main train station in Serbia’s second city.
Nationwide protests began after 15 people were killed when part of the canopy roof came crashing down on 1 November, a disaster blamed on rampant corruption.
On Monday Serbian students, supported by farmers, staged a 24-hour blockade of a major intersection in Belgrade. That followed calls for a general strike last Friday, when many people stopped work and schools and small businesses closed. An estimated 100,000 people attended a demonstration in Belgrade last month, while smaller protests took place in other cities.
The resignation of Vučević is seen as an attempt by Serbia’s powerful populist president, Aleksandar Vučić, to stay in power. Vučić, a pro-Russian nationalist who has dominated Serbian politics for a decade, called for a government reshuffle on Monday night.
Michael Roth, the Social Democrat chair of the German Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, tweeted: “Vučić sacrifices Vučević in order to stay in power himself.”
Marta Szpala, a senior fellow at the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw, said: “[Vučić’s] gamble seems to be that this resignation will satisfy the protesters and help him bring the protests under control.”
The analyst added that an alternative was a snap election, in which Vučić, she said, would seek to regain control of the narrative and take advantage of the decentralised nature of the protests. “He would hope to capitalise on the fact that there is no strong, united political structure in place to challenge his rule, as the opposition was expecting the next vote to be in 2027.”
Vučic’s Serbian Progressive party won a comfortable victory in parliamentary elections in December 2023, but government critics said the vote was fraudulent, while international observers found “instances of serious irregularities, including vote-buying and ballot-box stuffing.
Vučić addressed the nation on Monday evening, defending his government’s response to the Novi Sad disaster and promising a dialogue with protesters. He is expected to make another public address later on Tuesday.
The European Commission said it encouraged “all political actors to return to dialogue and refrain from escalating tensions”. A commission spokesperson said the EU was “concerned about incidents against demonstrators”, after it emerged that a female student had been hospitalised in clashes between supporters of the government and the opposition on Monday night.
Serbia has been an EU candidate country since 2011, but the latest progress report from the commission concluded that “corruption is prevalent in many areas and remains an issue of concern”.
More than a dozen people have been charged in connection with the Novi Sad disaster, including the former transport minister, Goran Vesić, who resigned days after it occurred.
The concrete, steel and glass canopy collapsed just months after the renovation was completed in July 2024, after the station was inaugurated in 2022 by Vučic, who told the BBC it was “our way to modern Europe”.
The government had sought to meet some of the students’ demands by declassifying some documents about the canopy collapse, most recently on Sunday, but that has so far failed to defuse the protests.
