If you're talking election, sound gun or not they would have won anyway, people in general were dissatisfied with Vucic and student list was pretty much the first opposition that was loud enough and marketed themselves well enough, and to be clear is only tangentially related to the student movement.

People on lemmy who only hear about the protests now from tabloids are giving it too much credit, it was a mess both internally and externally, a mess that's also been dead before the recent election for at least a year