The Young Global Citizen Daily

In 2024, a canopy at a newly renovated railway station in the city of Novi Sad collapsed and killed 16 people. Students then led protests that lasted almost two years, against alleged corruption, the misuse of power for private gain, and authoritarianism, meaning rule that ignores limits on power.

On Sunday those protests reached the ballot box. Serbia held a snap election, one called early, for all 250 seats in its parliament. The whole country votes as a single constituency, so seats are shared out according to each list's share of the national vote. The students backed a list of 250 candidates, many of them academics or political outsiders, led by cardiologist Ilija Srdanovic and running against corruption.

Their opponent is Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia's longtime leader. He resigned as president in September to run for prime minister. Reuters called the vote the biggest challenge to his rule for more than a decade. An Ipsos poll gave his SNS party 47% and the students 40%, but other polls put the students ahead, and Serbia lacks reliable independent polling. One analyst expected a “very tight” result.

Early turnout was strong, with long lines at polling stations. Opponents of Vucic and some independent monitoring groups warned of possible irregularities in the voting. Vucic, for his part, warned that any protests claiming fraud if his party won would be quickly put down.

A list needs at least 3% of the vote to win seats, so small parties can be shut out. Polls closed at 8pm local time, with first indications of the result expected about two hours later. The official count is not expected before Monday.

Every year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counts the babies born in the US. Its new report says the general fertility rate, the number of births for every 1,000 women of childbearing age, fell 1% in 2025 to its lowest level ever recorded. About 3.6 million babies were born, at a rate of roughly 53 per 1,000 women.

The drop was steepest for younger women. The rate fell 6% for women aged 20 to 24 and about 7% for teenagers. It rose a little for women aged 30 to 45, which kept the overall fall small.

The 2025 rate is nearly 20% below the rate two decades ago. A Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta study found that women in Generation Z are much less likely to want children than earlier generations. Researchers also point to people marrying and starting families later, and some experts argue that more women would have children if housing and childcare cost less.