1. A Political Earthquake That Caught the Old Guard Off Guard
When the final votes were counted in Serbia’s snap parliamentary election, the result was nothing short of a political earthquake. The Students’ List, a movement born from months of student-led protests, won an emphatic 52.7 percent of the vote, projected to translate into 140 seats in the 250-member National Assembly. The outgoing coalition led by President Aleksandar Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) trailed far behind with 39 percent, securing an expected 104 seats. For many observers, it was a moment that felt both exhilarating and improbable. After all, the campaign had been brutal, saturated with disinformation, personal smears and fear-mongering. The familiar playbook of branding opposition leaders as criminals, unpatriotic traitors or radical extremists had been deployed with full force. Yet this time, in Serbia, that playbook failed. International analysts immediately drew comparisons to Hungary’s parliamentary elections earlier in the spring, where another emerging opposition movement had also managed to break through despite a heavily skewed media environment. In both countries, the establishment seemed to believe that if they could drown the opposition in a sea of lies, the public would eventually lose trust in any alternative. But in Serbia, voters appeared to see through the manipulation. They looked at what the student movement actually stood for, recognised the distortions for what they were, and made a choice that defied the cynical expectations of the old political class. It was a victory not just for the Students’ List, but for the idea that ordinary citizens, when given enough time and enough courage, can reclaim their political destiny from the machinery of disinformation.
2. The Many Faces of Disinformation in Serbia’s Campaign
To understand how remarkable that victory truly was, one must look at the scale of the disinformation campaign that preceded it. Serbian fact-checking organization FN Tragač conducted detailed analyses of the false narratives circulating during the election campaign and found that identity politics was the most frequent theme. This included fabricated stories about Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and about Kosovo, subjects that have long been used to provoke nationalist anxieties. But the second most common theme was perhaps even more telling: an intense and sustained effort to discredit the Students’ List itself, its political programme and its candidates. False claims were everywhere. One female member of the student movement, Emina Spahić, was accused of refusing to wear a T-shirt featuring Cyrillic lettering, with a supposedly manipulated image used as proof. Another student, Emilija Milenković, was falsely accused of admitting on television that the movement’s programme included officially declaring Serbs a “genocidal people.” In reality, she had simply described Ratko Mladić, the convicted war criminal, as a war criminal. The distortions were not limited to individuals. Entire policy proposals were invented and attributed to the Students’ List. Tabloids claimed the movement wanted to cut pensions by 25 percent, fire every employee of the Ministry of the Interior and the armed forces, ban the children of SNS members from kindergartens, raise university tuition fees by 300 percent and convert cultural centres, sports halls and stadiums into detention facilities for SNS members. None of this appeared anywhere in the movement’s actual programme. The real proposal, for example, simply called for the dismissal of police officers who had broken the law in their treatment of students and citizens. It was a reasonable demand for accountability, twisted into something monstrous. Even the identities of candidates were manipulated, with social media users falsely claiming that certain individuals, such as musician Andrija Mitrović, were on the list when they were not. In a particularly insidious twist, some posts encouraged SNS voters and their coalition partners to circle the ballot numbers of both governing parties on the same ballot, which would have invalidated their votes. This was not simply misinformation; it was an attempt to sabotage the electoral participation of the regime’s own supporters.
3. Economic Lies and the Hungarian Parallel
Another deeply familiar tactic was the manipulation of economic statistics. Aleksandar Vučić, in a speech marking his departure from the presidency, presented inaccurate figures about public debt and unemployment during the period before his party came to power, painting a misleadingly rosy picture of his own administration’s economic record. This was a technique that Hungary’s Fidesz–KDNP coalition had also relied upon heavily during its own election campaign. Viktor Orbán repeatedly made misleading statements about job creation, minimum wage increases and pension developments, using distorted statistics to portray the country’s economy as far healthier than it actually was. The parallel between the two campaigns was striking. In both Serbia and Hungary, emerging opposition movements became the primary targets of coordinated disinformation, with special attention paid to their lead candidates. The sheer volume of negative coverage in Serbia was staggering. According to an analysis by CRTA and Instinomer, seven media outlets closely associated with the SNS published a total of 748 articles about the Students’ List and its candidates in just four days, between 14 and 18 September. Of those 748 articles, only 20 did not contain claims intended to discredit the movement or its representatives. Ilija Srdanović, the lead candidate of the Students’ List and a professor of cardiology, was personally attacked in 247 of those articles. That means roughly one in every three articles examined contained allegations directed specifically against him. The intent was clear: to drown the opposition in a flood of negativity so overwhelming that voters would either lose hope or simply accept the negative portrayal as truth. Yet the strategy backfired. The Serbian public, many of whom had participated in or witnessed the student protests, were not passive consumers of propaganda. They could see that the accusations did not match the reality they knew. The attempt to bury the Students’ List under an avalanche of lies only made people more determined to support it.
4. The Smear Campaign Against Ilija Srdanović
The attacks on Ilija Srdanović were particularly vicious and deeply personal. He was branded a “gangster” and accused of violating workplace regulations. The Serbian newspaper Alo published an article containing serious, unsubstantiated allegations that he had physically assaulted women. Soon after, other pro-government media outlets repeated these claims, describing him in headlines as “known for his violent behaviour” and as a “woman-beating scoundrel.” There were also absurd political smears: that he had recognised Kosovo’s independence, that he had lied about participating in a Serbian Christian religious event known as the Swimming for the Holy Cross, and that he had identified himself as Montenegrin during the most recent census. He was linked, without any evidence, to Montenegrin separatism, to the Democratic Party of Socialists of Montenegro and to Milo Đukanović, the former Montenegrin president. Fabricated evidence was circulated claiming he had unlawfully participated in a referendum in 2006. A manipulated photograph was even used to suggest that he had made an L-shaped hand gesture, which was falsely described as a symbol of Montenegrin sovereignty movements. The goal was to make him seem foreign, violent, untrustworthy and unpatriotic. It was a textbook smear campaign, and it was aimed at a man whose primary offence, as far as one could tell, was being a respected doctor who had chosen to stand up for a generation of students demanding accountability. The parallel with Hungary’s Péter Magyar was uncanny. Magyar, the leader of the Tisza Party and now Hungary’s prime minister, had been subjected to similar false allegations during his campaign. Days before the election, he was accused of preparing a coup d’état in cooperation with Manfred Weber, the president of the European People’s Party. False claims circulated that he had discussed plans to reintroduce compulsory military service in Hungary. In both countries, the establishment sought to transform opposition leaders into caricatures of villainy. But in Serbia, at least, the voters refused to accept the caricature. They saw Srdanović not as the monster described in the tabloids, but as a figure of integrity in a political landscape starved of it.
5. Fabricated Quotes and the Rise of AI-Generated Lies
Beyond personal attacks, the disinformation campaign relied heavily on two manipulation techniques: distorting quotes and falsely attributing actions or political values to individuals. FN Tragač identified these as the most frequently employed methods. One particularly grotesque example involved Vladimir Štimac, a former professional athlete and supporter of the Students’ List. The newspaper Alo published an article with the headline: “We will rape Vučić, and we will ride you!” – claiming that Štimac had announced this as the programme of the blockade list. The article linked to an Instagram video, but Štimac had said no such thing. The quote was completely fabricated. This kind of manipulation was also common in Hungary, where Fidesz-linked media circulated statements attributed to economist Péter Felcsuti that conveyed the exact opposite of what he had actually said, and falsely quoted István Kapitány as saying that Hungarian citizens would have to bear the costs of the country’s energy transition plan. Perhaps the most troubling new development in Serbia was the rapid proliferation of AI-generated content during the second half of the campaign. Milijana Rogač, editor-in-chief of the Serbian fact-checking outlet Istinomer, noted that the scale of manipulation involving artificial intelligence was unprecedented. Never before had so much AI-generated content circulated in the public sphere, and Srdanović was among the most frequent targets. An AI-generated video depicting him kissing a colleague during a protest accumulated over 80,000 views. Another AI-generated image was circulated in an attempt to prove that he was a member of the Democratic Party of Socialists of Montenegro. Artificial intelligence also played an increasingly prominent role in Hungary’s April election campaign, where TikTok was flooded with low-quality AI-generated content promoting Fidesz narratives, and Balázs Orbán used AI to attribute statements to Péter Magyar that he had never actually made. The rise of AI-generated disinformation represents a dangerous escalation in the fight against truth. It is no longer necessary to find a compromising photo or a real quote; you can simply create one. The technology has become so sophisticated that even fact-checkers sometimes struggle to keep up. Yet in Serbia, voters somehow managed to navigate this minefield of manufactured reality and make a choice based on their own lived experience and judgement.
6. The Distributors of Lies and the Resilience of Democracy
Who was responsible for spreading all this disinformation? FN Tragač’s analysis divided the distributors into three main categories. The largest proportion came from social media users, followed by media organisations and politicians. This is a crucial finding, because it reveals how disinformation operates in the modern age: it is not simply a top-down phenomenon, but a networked one, where ordinary users unknowingly amplify state-sponsored narratives alongside paid trolls and partisan outlets. The analysis also revealed which political actors were most frequently targeted by false information. The Students’ List was by far the most targeted group, accounting for approximately two-thirds of all identified cases. In contrast, only 8 percent of disinformation targeted the outgoing governing parties, and 2 percent targeted their coalition partners. These numbers paint a stark picture of the imbalance within Serbia’s media environment. The governing parties controlled most of the mainstream media, and they used that power to launch an all-out assault on the opposition, while enjoying near-total protection from negative coverage themselves. And yet, despite this overwhelming asymmetry, the Students’ List won. This is perhaps the most hopeful lesson of the Serbian election. It demonstrates that democracy, though fragile, is not helpless. Voters are not infinitely manipulable. They can recognise when they are being lied to, especially when the lies are so relentless and so absurd that they begin to lose their power. The student movement’s victory was not just a political change; it was a collective act of truth-telling. It showed that ordinary citizens, armed with patience, solidarity and a willingness to believe in something better, can overcome even the most sophisticated disinformation machinery. It also serves as a warning to those in power, in Serbia, in Hungary and elsewhere, that the old playbook of fear and fabrication is losing its effectiveness. People are learning to trust their own eyes, to verify what they see, and to stand with those who are unjustly attacked. In the end, the attempt to destroy Ilija Srdanović’s reputation backfired. The attempt to paint the Students’ List as a dangerous revolutionary force backfired. The attempt to manipulate voters into invalidating their ballots backfired. What remains is a society that has taken a bold step forward, not by ignoring the lies, but by seeing through them. And that is a victory worth celebrating, not just in Serbia, but everywhere that democracy is under threat.