By Barçın Yinanç
I was in Belgrade at the beginning of the month. I started to talk about the political situation in Serbia with the relatively young-looking driver.
Student protests which had begun after a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November 2024, continued relentlessly, finally forcing President Aleksandar Vučić to call for early elections.
As he seeks to remain in power by running for prime minister, he is facing the students, who now have their own “Students Win' list of 250 candidates for this Sunday, Oct 25 elections.
The situation is very tense; the driver told me, “People fear Vučić will not give up power even if he loses elections.” Many people I came across, including a foreign diplomat, feared the possibility of violence after the elections.
PIKACHU AND PINK PANTHER
I told the driver that it was commendable for the students to come with their own list for the elections.
You know, in Turkey we had student protests as well, I said, recalling the ones that sparked when Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, was arrested in March 2025.
“Yes, I followed them….Pikachu,” he said, recalling the protester who became a phenomenon as he wore a costume of the fictional yellow character from the Japanese Pokémon franchise.
Recently, we were again reminded of Pikachu since a person wearing a Pink Panther costume during student protests in France became viral on social media.
COCKROACHES IN INDIA
The symbol of students in India, by contrast, is represented by a less charming creature.
The Cockroach Movement was named after a remark by India’s Chief Justice comparing unemployed young demonstrators to cockroaches.
Protesting examination paper leaks and failures in the education system, students succeeded in forcing the Minister of Education to resign. Just like in Serbia, the student movement is now organized under the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), challenging Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been in power since 2014.
Supporters of the CJP have been holding daily protests this month demanding that the chief election commissioner resign over a revision of voter lists, which they claim favor Modi’s party.
The leaders of the movement who were detained were released this week.
The year Modi came to power, my friends and I went to India for a wedding. We told our Indian hosts that while Modi is welcomed by the Indian society as a strongman, there was a risk he could turn authoritarian, since we had witnessed by 2014 the changes in the way AKP ruled.
I met our hosts last week as they were visiting Istanbul. “What you had told us turned out to be true,” said one of them. I told them I was watching the student protests in India, which were turning violent.
“In Turkey, the police are merciless against students. They are sent to prisons. Their educational life comes to an end. It is good in your case that after detention for some days, student leaders are released,” I said.
“They can’t keep them in prison. They cannot do that. We are a democracy,” said one of them.
As a host, I did not want to comment.
So how come student protests in Turkey are not sustained and do not evolve into permanent organizations?
I asked this question to Can Selçuki, a prominent researcher, and got this answer:
“I don't think the main difference is a lack of political engagement among Turkish students. On the contrary, we have seen considerable mobilization, particularly since March 2025 and indeed a decade ago during the Gezi events. The problem is that this energy rarely translates into lasting organizational structures capable of sustaining collective action beyond moments of political crisis.”
Then he underlined the differences between Turkish and Serbian student movements. “Unlike Serbia, where students have managed to establish a relatively autonomous movement, student protests in Turkey tend to become absorbed into the broader confrontation between the government and the opposition. This gives them immediate political visibility but makes it harder to develop an independent identity, leadership and agenda, while the risks of repression further discourage sustained participation.”
