On the evening of 25 October 2026, Aleksandar Vučić came out to his supporters at the headquarters of the Serbian Progressive Party and said a short sentence: "It is perfectly clear that we lost this election. The 'Student List' won." A few minutes later, the streets of Belgrade were filled with tens of thousands of people with horns and shouts of "Aleksandar has left."
This is not merely a defeat of the ruling party. Vučić, who since 2014 had controlled power as prime minister and then as president, himself called early elections after two years of student protests. The trigger was the collapse of a canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad in 2024, which claimed 16 lives and exposed corruption and the inaction of the authorities. The protests, which began on campuses, turned into a nationwide movement that had no single leader and was therefore difficult to discredit.
Over the years in power, Vučić had grown accustomed to the role of a strong leader who knows how to mobilize the nationalist electorate and control the institutions. He had repeatedly won elections while accusing the opposition of foreign interference. This time, however, preliminary data showed that the "Student List" was taking about 52–53 % of the vote and winning 135–140 seats out of 250, while his party was taking about 105. Turnout approached 70 % — a record for decades.
The admission of defeat came almost immediately after the polls closed. Vučić did not dispute the results or call for a recount, as had happened before. He merely mentioned "independent media" and the "American deep state," but took no steps toward resistance. This suggests that the pressure of the street movement and the fatigue of his own base proved stronger than the usual instruments of holding on to power.
The student movement offered no ready-made program or charismatic leader — and that is precisely why it was able to unite professors, farmers, actors and judges. Vučić, accustomed to personalized politics, found himself facing an opponent who could not be personalized and demonized.
The situation resembles how a chess grandmaster, accustomed to complex combinations, loses when the opponent simply refuses to play by his rules and steers the game into an endgame where every move by the opponent increases the pressure. Vučić realized that further resistance would only hasten his political end.
For Serbia, this means not only a change of power but also a test: whether a decentralized movement can turn protest energy into durable institutions. For Vučić, it is a rare moment when the reputation of a strong leader collided with a reality he could no longer control.
