Serbia's protesting students and supporters of the president hold parallel rallies as tensions spike

KRAGUJEVAC, Serbia (AP) — Serbia’s striking students and supporters of populist President Aleksandar Vucic held parallel rallies Saturday as both marked a major holiday in the country with notably contrasting messages.

The student-led protest is the latest in a nationwide anti-graft movement that reflects mounting calls for fundamental political changes in the Balkan state, triggered after a concrete canopy on a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, killing 15 people.

The rally in the central industrial city of Kragujevac drew tens of thousands of people who, besides demanding justice over the tragedy, have been demanding that officials root out rampant endemic corruption and respect for the rule of law.

Students chose Kragujevac for Saturday's rally because of its history. In 1835, Serbia was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and people in Kragujevac announced a new constitution that sought to limit the powers of the then rulers. The date is now celebrated as Statehood Day, a national holiday.

People from all over the country streamed into Kragujevac for Saturday’s gathering.

“I am here to support this student rebellion, which has grown into a civil rebellion, and to fight for the rule of law and justice in this society, so that Serbia becomes a country where life is dignified,” said a woman from Belgrade who identified herself only by her first name Teodora because she didn't want to be targeted by state authorities.

The students arrived to cheers from the residents. Before the protest, they organized marches in various parts of the country, encouraging people to converge in Kragujevac. Some walked, others ran or cycled. Along their journey, people greeted them with food and refreshments and offered accommodation, many crying and expressing hope for change.

Meanwhile, in Sremska Mitrovica, a small town northwest of Belgrade, Vucic recycled a traditional nationalist theme, warning that the West wants to unseat him by force and that this could lead to the breakup of the country.

Before the rally attended by thousands of his supporters, Vucic said that the student protests “will go down in the history of dishonor” as “the dirtiest color revolution in the history of mankind,” referring to Ukraine and other uprisings against authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the 1980s and '90s.

At the rally, Vucic said that more than 3 billion euros ($3.14 billion) have been invested from abroad to topple him from power, but that the student “revolution” has failed. He didn't offer any proof for those claims.

“They have already lost, they don’t see how the political wheel has already turned," Vucic said, referring to the return to the White House of U.S. President Donald Trump, who the Serbian leader supports. "Unless they kill me."

“You who organized an attempted colored revolution in Serbia, I will destroy you in the whole world,” said Vucic, pledging to write a book on how he destroyed the student uprising that he said will be published abroad, including China.

Authorities in Serbia bused in thousands of supporters to the pro-Vucic rally from throughout the country as well as neighboring Bosnia.

The anti-graft movement is Vucic's biggest challenge in recent years. The president — who has ruled Serbia with a firm grip on power for more than a decade — and his right-wing Serbian Progressive Party have been previously accused of stifling democratic freedoms, publicly discrediting opponents and rigging elections, according to international vote observers.

The canopy disaster, widely believed to have happened because of government corruption, has become a flashpoint for wider discontent with the authoritarian rule, with university students at the forefront of the anti-graft uprising. Their determination, youth and creativity have struck a chord among people widely disillusioned with politicians.

Prosecutors have charged 13 people over the canopy fall, and protests have forced the resignation of Serbia’s prime minister. But students have said that their protests will continue until their demands for full accountability are met.

In the past three months, the president has shifted between accusing the students of working for foreign powers to offering concessions and claiming he has fulfilled each of their demands.

During Vucic's trip to the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia earlier this week, he stressed Serbian unity with the Serbs in Bosnia, where a bid to create a pan-Serb state in the 1990s was widely blamed for triggering a bloody war that left more than 100,000 people killed and millions displaced.

At the pro-Vucic rally, Bosnian Serb separatist leader Milorad Dodik said that Serbs in Bosnia don't want to remain a part of Bosnia, but want to join Serbia in a joint state.

“We love Serbia,” he said to the cheers of the crowd.

Jovana Gec and Dusan Stojanovic contributed to this report from in Belgrade.

A man wearing a traditional Serbian hat with a child attends a student-led large protest and a 15-hour blockade of the streets in Serbian industrial town of Kragujevac, to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November collapse of a train station canopy, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

A man blows a vuvuzela during a student-led large protest and a 15-hour blockade of the streets in Serbian industrial town of Kragujevac, to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November collapse of a train station canopy, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

A man holds a banner with red hands symbolizing blood during a student-led large protest and a 15-hour blockade of the streets in Serbian industrial town of Kragujevac, to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November collapse of a train station canopy, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, left, poses with Bosnian Serb political leader Milorad Dodik during a rally marking the country's Statehood Day in Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Ahel)

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic waves to his supporters during a rally marking the country's Statehood Day in Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Ahel)

People shout slogans during a student-led large protest and a 15-hour blockade of the streets in Serbian industrial town of Kragujevac, to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November collapse of a train station canopy, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People attend a protest triggered after a concrete canopy on a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 killed 15 people, in Kragujevac, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People attend a minute of silence during a protest triggered after a concrete canopy on a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 killed 15 people, in Kragujevac, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People attend a protest triggered after a concrete canopy on a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 killed 15 people, in Kragujevac, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Marko Drobnjakovic)

People attend a protest triggered after a concrete canopy on a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 killed 15 people, in Kragujevac, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People attend a protest triggered after a concrete canopy on a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 killed 15 people, in Kragujevac, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Marko Drobnjakovic)

People attend a protest triggered after a concrete canopy on a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 killed 15 people, in Kragujevac, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People attend a protest triggered after a concrete canopy on a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 killed 15 people, in Kragujevac, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People hold banner that reads: "Welcome to Serbia" during a protest triggered after a concrete canopy on a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 killed 15 people, in Kragujevac, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People attend a protest triggered after a concrete canopy on a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 killed 15 people, in Kragujevac, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People attend a moment of silence during a protest triggered after a concrete canopy on a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 killed 15 people, in Kragujevac, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

A woman records video with her smartphone during a protest triggered after a concrete canopy on a railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 killed 15 people, in Kragujevac, Serbia, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Students arrive in the Serbian industrial town of Kragujevac, to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November collapse of a train station canopy, Friday, Feb. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People welcome students in the Serbian industrial town of Kragujevac, who have arrived to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November collapse of a train station canopy, Friday, Feb. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People welcome students in the Serbian industrial town of Kragujevac, who have arrived to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November collapse of a train station canopy, Friday, Feb. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Students arrive in the Serbian industrial town of Kragujevac, to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November collapse of a train station canopy, Friday, Feb. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Students march near the village of Cumic near the Serbian industrial town of Kragujevac, to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November collapse of a train station canopy, Friday, Feb. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Students arrive in Serbian industrial town of Kragujevac, to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November collapse of a train station canopy, Friday, Feb. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

People welcome students in the Serbian industrial town of Kragujevac, who have arrived to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November collapse of a train station canopy, Friday, Feb. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Residents welcome students in the Serbian industrial town of Kragujevac, who have arrived to protest the deaths of 15 people killed in the November collapse of a train station canopy, Friday, Feb. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

NEW YORK (AP) — On a recent weeknight, three tenants of an aging Bronx building were trading apartment horror stories inside a packed ballroom lined with city bureaucrats.

The occasion was the third in a series of “rental rip-off hearings,” a new forum launched by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani for disgruntled renters to air their complaints directly to housing officials — and in some cases, the mayor himself.

As she waited in line, Gulhayo Yuldosheva said she worried that noxious mold in her apartment had worsened her child’s asthma. Nearby, her downstairs neighbor, Marina Quiroz, was showing a video of rats scurrying through her kitchen to a representative of the city’s tenant protection office.

Ann Maitin, a longtime resident of the same building, had just met with the mayor.

“He let me go over my three minutes,” she said, holding up a spiral notebook’s worth of grievances.

Mamdani, a democratic socialist swept into office on a promise of zealous tenant advocacy, framed the event as a struggle session for renters, assuring the standing room only crowd that their stories would guide the city's efforts “to actually hold landlords accountable when they don’t follow the law."

To the residents of 705 Gerard Avenue, this raised a practical problem: No one seemed to know who actually owned their building.

“It feels like such a basic question,” said Maitin, a retired Verizon technician who recently organized the building’s tenant association. “You’d think we’d have the right to that information.”

Their situation is hardly unique. As corporate owners and investor groups have grown their share of the rental market in New York City, they are increasingly shielding their identities behind limited liability companies, or LLCs.

The practice, which has also been spreading nationally, is legal. But experts warn it could complicate Mamdani’s promised crackdown, making it harder for the city and tenants to track the chronically negligent owners whose buildings the mayor has vowed to target and even seize.

“There are these big slumlords that everyone knows are doing predatory investment, but pinning them down is going to be difficult, for the LLC reason,” said Oksana Mironova, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society. “That’s a problem for the administration, and it’s even worse for tenants.”

For Yuldosheva and her neighbors, finding their landlord is one of many problems afflicting their six-story building near Yankee Stadium.

Heat and hot water outages are regular enough that some tenants keep a thermometer on their fridge and the city’s complaint hotline on speed dial. Common areas are often filthy, and increasingly populated by drug users. Getting help with an urgent maintenance issue “feels like waiting for Christmas in July,” said Maitin.

During a monthslong elevator outage, a tenant who uses a wheelchair, Tommy Rodriguez, said he was forced to “slide down the steps, like a kid.” Calls to the building management about a repair timeline went unanswered, he said.

Growing up in the building in the 1980s, Rodriguez recalled the previous landlord as a friendly and responsive neighborhood presence.

“This felt like a home before,” Rodriguez said. “Now they treat us the same as the rats.”

A large rodent had recently chewed a hole through his couch cushion. He handled the extermination himself, with a two-by-four.

Recently, tenants received a clue about their landlord, following the partial collapse of another Bronx building. The man identified in news stories as the owner of that building, David Kleiner, shared a Brooklyn office with their building manager, Binyomin Herzl.

A handful of tenants visited each of the building’s 72 units, logging an array of decrepit conditions and unusual alterations.

“We didn’t want to become the next news story,” said Yuldosheva, pointing to a crack in the wall of a bedroom shared by her three children — a result, she feared, of the subway that rumbles just below her windows.

Lawsuits show that Herzl has been ordered to pay more than $100,000 for violations across at least six Bronx buildings, several of which were found by a judge to pose an imminent hazard.

Reached by phone, Herzl said he didn't own any of those properties, but simply acted as a middleman between tenants and the true owners, whom he declined to list. “There’s no one landlord,” he said. “It’s a group of investors.”

Kleiner, who was previously featured on the city’s “worst landlord” list, confirmed his partial ownership of 705 Gerard in a brief phone call, but declined further comment.

Herzl, meanwhile, attributed the tenants’ complaints to “normal wear and tear” of a nearly century old building. He said Mamdani should focus on improving the city’s public housing, rather than going after private landlords.

“Our buildings look like five star hotels against his,” he added.

When landlords refuse to address a serious violation, like heat or hot water outages, the city can step in and order repairs, then bill the owner directly.

In the last three years, inspectors have ordered emergency repairs at 38 buildings that list either Herzl or Kleiner as an owner, according to records provided by the city’s housing department. The men have been billed $446,521 for those repairs.

Mamdani has proposed using such fines as a vehicle to bring distressed rental properties under city stewardship, by aggressively pursuing liens on delinquent landlords and buying up their portfolios through foreclosure auctions.

Just as the city can shut down unsanitary restaurants, Mamdani has said, landlords that “repeatedly put New Yorkers at risk will not be allowed to operate in New York City — with no exceptions."

In reality, the process is resource-intensive and legally fraught. It is made more complex by the nest of LLCs often used by landlords to obfuscate the full scope of their portfolios, according to Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

“It’d be great to have a better sense of who owns the buildings that we are regulating and overseeing,” she said.

State legislation that would have made it easier to identify LLC owners was recently vetoed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul amid pressure from landlords.

Kenny Burgos, the CEO of the New York Apartment Association, a landlord lobbying group, said Mamdani’s tenant proposals — including freezing the rent for regulated tenants — would force landlords to cut back on maintenance and services.

“That’s going to take away from the elevator budget, the boiler budget, the heating budget,” he said. “It’s a question of math: These buildings are crumbling because of policy, not because of bad landlords.”

He characterized the rental rip-off hearings as “show trials” that took a “tribal approach” to the city’s affordable housing crisis.

Despite the combative branding — “New Yorkers vs. Bad Landlords,” blares one promotion — the Bronx event mostly resembled a standard constituent service night: City officials fielded questions about local laws, helped residents with paperwork and connected them to service providers.

Maitin left feeling “glad to be heard by someone who can actually do something about the problem,” but felt it was too early to tell “if it’s all talk."

The next morning, she was surprised to find the building’s superintendent applying a fresh coat of paint to a staircase. Outside, workers were removing scaffolding that had been in front of the building for years.

“I think they caught wind of the rental rip-off,” Maitin said. “They’re scared.”

FILE - New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Rental Ripoff Hearing at Fordham University on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki, File)

Gulhayo Yuldosheva's children get ready for school in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Francisco Medina, left, cleans his apartment next to his relative, Maria Frias, right, in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Gulhayo Yuldosheva, 33 , center right, Marina Quiroz, 65, top, pose for a portrait with other two residents in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Tommy Rodriguez, right, talks to his relative, Francisco Medina, left, in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)

Marina Quiroz stands in her living room in a Bronx apartment building, where tenants report maintenance issues, pest infestations, Tuesday, March 17, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)