BELGRADE — Aleksandar Vucic conceded defeat in Serbia's snap parliamentary election on Sunday night, telling the country that a movement born of two years of student protests had beaten the party that has governed since 2012.

Speaking about an hour and a half after polls closed at 8pm local time, Vucic said a sample of counted ballots showed the Students' List would take between 135 and 140 of the 250 seats in the National Assembly, against about 105 for his Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS. "It is clear that we have lost these elections," he said, according to Al Jazeera.

The result ends 14 years in which Vucic, who served two near-full terms as president before stepping down last month, held near-total control of Serbian politics. It hands power to a list of political newcomers who will have to balance relations with the European Union, which Serbia hopes to join, Russia, its traditional ally and main supplier of natural gas, and China, a major investor, Reuters reported.

Vucic said the SNS had won about 1.7 million votes to around 2.2 million for the Students' List. Those figures were his own; the election commission had not published results. A projection by the pollster CeSID-IPSOS reported by Reuters gave the Students' List 138 seats and the SNS 104, with ethnic minority parties taking the rest. A government needs 126 seats.

The State Election Commission put turnout at 64.9 percent by 6pm, two hours before polls closed, and monitors said the final figure could approach 70 percent. Al Jazeera and Reuters called it the highest turnout since 1992, when Yugoslavia broke apart. About 6.5 million people were eligible to vote, Al Jazeera reported, and 18 lists competed, with a 3 percent threshold to enter parliament.

Vucic blamed independent media, interference by European countries he did not name and what he called an "American deep state", AP reported. He had been endorsed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and spent the campaign describing the student movement as a foreign-led attempt to unseat him. Vucic and the SNS deny the corruption accusations that drove the protests.

Celebrations broke out in Belgrade and other cities after his address. Fireworks went up, drivers leaned on their horns and tens of thousands of people filled the main roads, chanting "Aleksandar is gone". Crowds tore down fences and tents in a central Belgrade park where his loyalists had camped for more than a year, and one tent was set alight, AP reported. Police in riot gear had earlier cordoned off streets around the election commission's headquarters, and city prosecutors urged everyone to avoid violence.

Radomir Saicic, a Belgrade University professor who stands as a Students' List candidate, told the crowd the victory brought "a hope that Serbia can be a country of justice, freedom and dignity".

The movement traces back to November 2024, when a concrete canopy at the renovated railway station in Novi Sad collapsed and killed 16 people. Students and their supporters blamed graft and cronyism in the renovation contracts, and demands for accountability widened into a nationwide campaign against what protesters saw as corruption and creeping authoritarianism. Student campaigners cycled and walked across the country to reach voters in rural areas, AP reported.

Dijana Hrka, the mother of one of the victims, said she had been waiting two years for this moment and expected everyone responsible to be held to account, according to AP.

Vucic dissolved parliament on September 9, after almost two years of unrest, and later resigned the presidency to lead the SNS campaign and seek the prime minister's job himself. He promised higher pensions, public-sector pay rises and new investment, and his supporters credit him with modernising the economy.

The Students' List is not a conventional party. Its candidates include academics, doctors, actors, athletes, farmers and artists, most of them little known to the public, and no students appear on the ballot. Reuters reported that the list is headed by the cardiologist Ilija Srdanovic, but it is not clear who would become prime minister. Some established opposition parties backed the students rather than fielding their own lists.

Independent monitors reported problems during the day. CRTA said it recorded pressure on voters or election workers at almost a third of the 500 polling stations it watched, and CeSID had logged about 260 reports of possible irregularities by 5pm, including people photographing their ballots and group voting. The campaign itself was marked by detentions, near-total government control of the media and reports of surveillance of activists, AP reported.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen congratulated the Students' List on X and said the bloc was ready to support reforms on the rule of law, media freedom and anti-corruption, and to advance Serbia's path to membership, Al Jazeera reported.

Political analysts expect some form of purge of Vucic allies from the police, security services and ministries, Reuters reported. Jelena Vasiljevic, a researcher at the University of Belgrade, told Al Jazeera before the vote that the SNS retained a loyal voter base and the students would need to bring out people who normally stay home.

The State Election Commission has yet to publish final results, which will determine whether any smaller lists cleared the 3 percent threshold and fix the seat count the Students' List must turn into a governing majority of at least 126 seats.