Nick covers Italy, the Vatican, Greece and the Balkans. He has reported for the paper since 2000, having previously covered Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific 8:19pm GMT A Serbian television station has apologised to its viewers for biased reporting and for failing to challenge the regime of Aleksandar Vučić.

The authoritarian leader and ally of Vladimir Putin was defeated in a shock election result on Sunday after dominating the country for 12 years as prime minister or president. His party was toppled from power by a popular movement called the Student List.

“For years, we failed to fulfil our duty,” Goran Eror, a news anchor, said on Radio Television Vojvodina, a state media channel in a northern province of the country. “We kept silent, turned a blind eye, reported events one-sidedly and failed to ask the necessary questions. For that, we owe our viewers an apology.”

Protesters confront Dragan Vucicevic, the editor of Informer TV in his studio Analysts are expecting purges and score-settling in Serbia as the Student List draws up plans for rooting out corruption, cronyism and the state capture of key institutions, from the media to the judiciary.

Nenad Čačić, the acting editor-in-chief of Radio Television Vojvodina, has resigned, and the channel opened its news broadcast with footage of celebrations greeting the election triumph of the Student List – footage that it had failed to show the night before.

The country’s student movement demanded that senior figures in the national broadcaster resign because of their alleged bias during Mr Vučić’s reign.

Protesters stormed another station, Informer TV, which was on air as around 30 people walked into its newsroom on Monday evening and surrounded Dragan Vučićević, the editor-in-chief and owner.

Some protesters shouted “This is how it is in free Serbia”, and “Where is Vučić now?”Some also called for Vučićević’s arrest.

The historic defeat of Mr Vučić’s party came after two years of mass protest prompted by the collapse of a railway station canopy in the city of Novi Sad that killed 16 people in 2024.

State TV covered little of the mass protests which gripped Serbia for the last two years Throughout the marches and demonstrations, students regularly accused the publicly funded Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) of failing to cover their growing protest movement.

“We demand the resignations of the RTS director general, his deputy, the editors-in-chief responsible for news coverage and all news editors,” the students said in a letter on Tuesday.

“We consider it particularly unacceptable to uncritically report insulting remarks and messages targeting students and other citizens over their views.”On election night, the broadcaster stopped covering events in Belgrade after Mr Vučić conceded defeat, despite huge crowds celebrating into the early hours across the capital.

With nearly all votes counted, the Student List movement has won 52.8 per cent of the vote, giving it around 140 seats in the 250-seat parliament.

Riot police were sent to stand guard in front of the TV Pink building in Belgrade as the election took place That is enough to govern alone, without entering into coalitions with other parties. Later this week, the leaderless movement will nominate a prime minister and form a government.

The announcement on Radio Television Vojvodina was reminiscent of a move by the main Hungarian state TV channel after the election defeat of former prime minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in April.

Three months later, the channel displayed a black screen with the message: “Public media cannot lie. We apologise for doing so for many years.”Serbia is ranked 104th out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, its lowest position ever, and the worst in the EU-Balkan region.