Shillong: Students across Belgrade are cleaning up their city. They are painting over ugly, anti-student graffiti left behind during a brutal campaign. The cleanup effort follows the October 25 election victory of the Students’ List movement, which successfully toppled former President Aleksandar Vucic and his Serbian Progressive Party.
This political shift ends 14 years of authoritarian control. Residents across Serbia are organizing to scrub away the stains of the old regime. On Friday, teenagers from three central Belgrade high schools grabbed brushes and paint rollers to tackle neighborhoods near their classrooms. They moved quickly. They coordinated zones to ensure maximum coverage of their territory.
Lea Radic, an 18-year-old student assembly leader at Third High School, said the drive was about immediate action. "We had this desire to make not only our country better, but also the city we live in," Radic said. She noted that people refused to wait for weeks to start making their surroundings nicer.
The youth movement gained momentum after two years of protests sparked by a deadly 2024 train station collapse that killed 16 people. Government officials and media outlets previously labeled these students as foreign mercenaries and traitors. Police and loyalist gangs beat and detained scores of protesters during the unrest. Now, the tide has turned. Volunteers have already cleared a central park occupied by Vucic supporters and scrubbed an underground passage clean.
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