Serbia’s election was less a win for one set of politicians than “a victory of the people over politicians in general”, Alexander Baunov wrote in Carnegie Politika on October 26.

Aleksandar Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), in power for 14 years, lost the October 25 vote to the Student List, the movement that grew out of the protests after the canopy of Novi Sad's railway station collapsed in November 2024, killing 16 people. Baunov, a senior fellow at Carnegie's Berlin centre, puts the list's share at 52.5% against 39.3% for Vucic's list, on the electoral commission's preliminary count.

The result is more than a defeat for Vucic. The winners have no backing from oligarchs, from defectors out of the elite or from the West, and the movement mixes liberals and nationalists held together by a demand for good government.

"These elections became one of the first cases in which the street did not break the old institutional frame but peacefully filled it," Baunov wrote. "And now it has to prove that the power of protest can become the power of government."

Horizontal against vertical

The detail Baunov picks out of Vucic's concession speech is that nobody else made it into parliament apart from the two big lists and the national minority parties. Ivica Dacic's Socialist Party, founded by Slobodan Milosevic, took 2.2% and missed the 3% threshold, and every other list, the old opposition coalition European Serbia included, polled under 1%.

"The key thing is the victory of the horizontal over the vertical: of a network movement that put political nobodies up for election over the veteran Vucic, who has been in politics since the 1990s and ran the country from the mid-2010s, but also over the old opposition parties," he wrote.

Belgrade celebrated on the night of October 26 "as if Serbia had scored the winning goal at the World Cup", Baunov wrote. Men in black hoodies were still being bussed into the pro-government tent camp in the city centre on election evening, but after the concession some of them, according to eyewitnesses he cites, joined the student crowds and chanted the victory slogans. Many of them come from the world around football, he notes. "Vucic is leaving; the contract with him is no longer valid."

Turnout was 10-15 percentage points higher than usual and was approaching 70% when the polls closed, not counting the diaspora vote, according to Baunov, who sets it against the 22.5% that turned out for Bulgaria's presidential election on the same day.

A movement without leaders

The students built their list of 250 names at plenums over more than a year and left themselves and the protest organisers off it, along with any professional politicians. It is headed by Ilija Srdanovic, a professor at the medical faculty in Novi Sad, and includes the chemist and academician Radomir Saicic, the sociologist Jovo Bakic, former central bank governor Dejan Soskic and the basketball player Dejan Bodiroga. It is not clear whether the roughly 140 seats won will go strictly in list order.

The move as a deliberate defence against the fate of France's gilets jaunes, according to Baunov.. In November 2018 only two of the eight "envoys" the movement chose by online vote turned up to meet Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, and one walked out almost at once demanding a live broadcast. "Such is the crumbling funnel of modern anti-elitism," Baunov wrote.

No oligarchs and no West

Serbia's experience is different to what has happened with Ukraine's Servant of the People in 2019, which was a president's party from the start, and with the 2004 Orange Revolution, built around career politicians and a stolen election. Nor is there a split in the elite of the kind seen in Hungary, where Viktor Orban was voted out in April after 16 years by an opposition led by Peter Magyar, a former insider in Orban's Fidesz.

The West was not behind the students either. Vucic made a show of betting on Donald Trump and told the UN in September that Serbia supported his administration's actions, and the White House did not react to the result straight away. Conceding, Vucic blamed "various European countries" and the "American deep state that opposes President Trump", Baunov writes.

Europe, in his reading, was a sympathetic onlooker mostly concerned with fragile stability in the Balkans, and the absence of recognisable pro-European leaders made the movement awkward to back. "It is hard to back a pig in a poke - a list of 250 people chosen by the votes of who knows whom," he wrote.

The campaign was not a contest between West and East either. Vucic warned his supporters that the new government would impose sanctions on Russia "by March or April", but Bakic, one of the winning candidates, said there would be none. "Russia is now too toxic to win an election on the idea of turning towards it, even in a country like Serbia," Baunov wrote. He compares the absence of anti-Moscow slogans at the protests with Armenia, where Western capitals and media also struggled to pick a side.

Good government against bad

The students instead ran on the contrast between good and bad government, "as in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescoes in Siena", campaigning against corruption and for efficient spending, competent economic management and decent infrastructure. That, Baunov argues, got round the classic split in the Serbian opposition between liberal Europeans and conservative nationalists who disliked Vucic equally but could not agree with each other.

Liberals and nationalists are both still inside the movement: only Serbian flags and faculty emblems were allowed at its rallies, and the Vidovdan rally on June 28, 2025 heard nationalist rhetoric and the Kosovo myth from the stage. In 2026 the students adopted a memorandum on Kosovo as part of Serbia while also running and cycling to Strasbourg and Brussels and meeting European commissioners. Baunov likens them to the liberal-nationalist coalitions that won elections and revolutions across the post-communist world, from Poland and the Balkans to Russia in 1991, Georgia and Ukraine.

Why Vucic gave up

Vucic conceded about an hour and a half after the polls closed. Baunov gives three reasons: a gap of more than half a million votes was too wide to contest by force or by trickery, the movement was too broad to be painted as the enemy of "the people", and the European perspective remained part of Vucic's own strategy. "EU membership worked as a safety catch against autocracy in Hungary ... and candidate status in Serbia," he wrote.

Vucic also has a political future to think of. He stepped down as president in September to lead his list and run for prime minister, and Serbia has to hold a presidential election by December 27. Clinging on would have pushed him away from Europe towards a Russia that is distant and busy with its war, Baunov writes. "In the 1990s Serbia fought every war except a civil one, and Vucic clearly has no wish to become the cause of one."

"What makes the movement strong at the moment of the election will become its weakness when it forms a government and governs," he added. "Here Vucic has all the advantages of experience and a bench of cadres."

Baunov describes Vucic's Serbia as a competitive autocracy, where the incumbent uses every administrative, media and even coercive resource but stops short of outright fraud. He cites the December 2023 snap election, when OSCE observers recorded pressure on voters and misuse of state resources and the independent NGO CRTA documented voters being organised and bussed into Belgrade, yet the same observers found voters still had a genuine choice.

The street in a frame

Horizontal protests usually have a short half-life, Baunov writes, citing Moscow's Bolotnaya Square and the gilets jaunes, and keeping the Serbian one going for two years was itself an achievement. What came next mattered more: the protest found a way to fill the existing institutional frame and use it without breaking it.

Power changed hands in Belgrade without fear of a coup, external pressure, a ruler's flight like Viktor Yanukovych's or a public worn out by street violence. "In Belgrade, one might say, not a single boutique was damaged," Baunov wrote. "It is as if the student movements of 1968 had gone to the polls and won. Not later, as the 'generation of 68' in power decades on, but straight away."