We have not yet reached a 1968 moment, when students at the Sorbonne lit a fuse that detonated a crisis that eventually brought down the De Gaulle government. But in late 2026, starting with the symbolic act of young French people climbing the July Column at Paris’s Place de la Bastille, the world is experiencing the biggest outbreak of student demonstrations for 60 years.

When Italian students subsequently occupied a high school in Rome, they opened their demand for change with the words “like in France”. Youth demonstrations are now raging from India – where the government has responded with repressive force to the Cockroach movement – to Albania, where, after being out on the streets for nearly five months, students are demanding not only an end to corruption, but the replacement of the government.

But the most momentous set of protests has been in Serbia, where the Student List of candidates for national parliamentary elections has succeeded not just in dislodging a long-established, corruption-tainted government alleged to have links with organised crime, but in securing an electoral mandate. It is now poised to form a new administration. Nothing of this kind has ever happened before.

Student List is not only changing the political leadership of Serbia but popularising new methods of organising; it is building a system for selecting candidates from outside its own ranks, using methods such as open public assemblies with rotating delegates and specialised working groups. Eighty-five student assemblies selected the candidates, as an analysis of their internal rules explains. And the results are often surprising: the rector of Belgrade university,........

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