The anchor of a state television channel apologized on air for pumping out “one-sided information” for years in favor of Aleksandar Vucic, the Serbian strongman defeated in a tumultuous general election on Sunday, and promised to do better.
The editor in chief of an incendiary tabloid notorious for smearing Mr. Vucic’s critics had his offices invaded by protesters demanding that he, too, apologize. He refused and called the police.
Whether frightened into contrition or clinging to defiance, servants of Serbia’s routed political establishment, particularly in the media, are reviewing their allegiances as their triumphant opponents veer between calls for calm and demands for vengeance.
“Please, do not resort to any form of violence,” pleaded Ilija Srdanovic, the cardiologist who led the slate of victorious anti-Vucic candidates selected by student protesters for the Sunday election. “We must remain dignified until the very end,” he added, noting that while his camp had clearly won, the final official results were not out yet.
But Mr. Srdanovic was just the first candidate on the winning slate, called Student List-Students Win, not the overall leader of the newly formed political bloc, and he has no authority to dictate how its members and their supporters behave.
The Student List has diverse, sometimes contradictory views. Its candidates, nearly all political novices from academia, sports and other professions, range from pro-European liberals who want to get Serbia into the European Union and impose sanctions on Russia to Kremlin-friendly nationalists who are hostile to the European bloc.
It has no single leader, and it has not yet designated who from its ranks will become prime minister when the new Parliament convenes sometime in the next month. Thanks to the hefty majority of at least 140 seats it won in Serbia’s 250-member Parliament, the Student List will be able to appoint a government of its choice, but what shape that will take is far from clear.
Throughout nearly two years of street demonstrations, student protesters in the vanguard of the movement that has toppled Mr. Vucic deliberately avoided establishing clear leadership, fearing that doing so would allow the authorities to undermine their cause by making targeted arrests.
Students in the movement, who make decisions in closed-door meetings they call “plenums,” on Tuesday asked candidates who won seats on Sunday “not to give any statements, written or spoken, on the street or anywhere else, on any subject, to the tabloids and pro-government television stations.”
“Until yesterday, these people were publishing articles saying that we were Ustashe and terrorists, and now they are switching sides,” students said in a message to candidates, referring to the World War II-era Croatian fascists called Ustashe.
On Monday evening, defying Mr. Srdanovic’s calls for calm, a mob made up mostly of young men barged into the offices of Informer, an incendiary newspaper and television station. Before the election, Informer routinely denounced Mr. Vucic’s rivals as traitors and specialized in releasing wildly exaggerated or fabricated stories about them, often salacious.
Confronting Informer’s owner and editor in chief, Dragan Vucicevic, in its offices in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, one protester shouted: “Come here and say it: ‘I am a dummy and I apologize to the people of Serbia.’” Others screamed vulgar abuse.
Responding to the incident on Tuesday, Mr. Vucic — who resigned as president before the election, hoping voters would make him prime minister — issued an ominous warning.
“If they decide to continue terrorizing people who think differently — assaulting them, beating them, smashing things and everything else — and the state authorities do nothing, we will be forced to organize ourselves,” he said. Mr. Vucic has been accused by his opponents of having close ties to gangsters, and in the past he has often mobilized Serbia’s notoriously violent soccer hooligans to defend his political camp’s interests.
The attack on Informer followed a call for action against the media group by Dijana Hrka, a mother who became the face of the protest movement against Mr. Vucic last year, when she began a hunger strike outside Parliament. She was demanding justice for 16 people, including her 27-year-old-son, who were killed when a concrete canopy fell from a newly renovated train station in the northern city of Novi Sad in November 2024.
That disaster, which many Serbs blamed on government corruption, set off the nationwide protests that continued until the election. Informer turned its fire on Ms. Hrka after she began her hunger strike, referring to her son and the others killed as “so-called victims” and suggesting that the tragedy had somehow been staged by the opposition to whip up anger against Mr. Vucic.
To opponents of Mr. Vucic, Informer is a symbol of the vicious mendacity and authoritarianism of the previous order, which controlled nearly all major media outlets and made it difficult for even moderately critical voices to get a fair hearing.
After the raid on Informer, a separate group of protesters gathered outside the offices of Pink, another zealously pro-Vucic television channel. Some threw eggs and bottles at the building, but there was no attempt to storm it.
“The media will be one of the bigger challenges for the new government,” said Snjezana Milivojević, a retired professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Belgrade. Hate speech pumped out by outlets like Informer, she said, had made all civil discourse nearly impossible. She wants the whole system reorganized to protect the independence of news outlets and bring Serbia in line with European standards.
The post-election furor over the news media mirrors struggles that took place in Poland in 2023, after the defeat of the nationalist Law and Justice party, and in Hungary this year, after the April election rout of the longtime populist leader Viktor Orban.
In both of those countries, media outlets that had served the defeated government faced heavy pressure to align with the new order, as incoming leaders struggled to uproot what they denounced as key levers of past authoritarian control.
In Warsaw after Poland’s last parliamentary election, the main state television news channel abruptly went off the air when the defeated governing party sent right-wing legislators and other supporters to try to prevent new management, appointed by a newly formed centrist government, from taking over.
On Tuesday, Serbian students demanded the immediate resignation of the director general of Radio Television Serbia, the main state broadcasting network, and all editors responsible for news programming.
Some previously vocal pro-Vucic editors and journalists are already switching sides. Radio Television Vojvodina, an arm of the state broadcasting system covering northern Serbia, on Monday belatedly aired footage from the previous evening that showed jubilant crowds celebrating Mr. Vucic’s defeat.
The news anchor Goran Eror apologized for not showing the scenes earlier and read a statement: “For many years, this public broadcaster failed to fulfill its role. We kept silent, turned a blind eye, provided one-sided information and reported uncritically. The right questions were not asked — or no questions were asked at all. And for that, we owe our viewers an apology.”
But others, particularly Informer, are sticking to their pro-Vucic guns.
The Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia on Tuesday announced that it would ask regulators to revoke Informer’s television license “in response to years of systematic violations of the law and programming obligations.”
The media regulatory agency, like most nominally independent institutions in Serbia, was controlled for years by Mr. Vucic and his allies, which meant it almost never sanctioned even the most egregious violations of fairness rules.
Informer’s editor in chief, Mr. Vucicevic, accustomed to strong support from the state, called the police for help when the protesters stormed his offices. Riot police later appeared but did not intervene. Mr. Vucicevic, who was broadcasting his calls, also phoned Mr. Srdanovic, the Student List’s top candidate, and pleaded with him to call off the attack. “I can’t hear you,” Mr. Srdanovic replied.
No one was injured, and damage was limited to a few overturned computer monitors and a broken window.
But Mr. Vucic and his shellshocked allies seized on the incident as evidence that the opposition, having won a decisive victory, wanted to unleash a wave of terror. Mr. Orban made similar claims against his opponents after Hungarian voters ended his many years in power. Poland’s defeated Law and Justice party said the same of its own foes.
On Monday night, Mr. Vucic, wearing a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the word “sorry” with a line through it, appeared in a video released on his Instagram account, condemning the attack on Informer as “unprecedented violence, monstrous violence” and “an attack on freedom of expression, freedom.”
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