Aleksandar Vučić lost Serbia’s snap parliamentary election on Oct 25 2026 and said so himself about ninety minutes after the polls closed. Based on his party’s sample count, he said, it was clear they had lost. By his own numbers the Student List will hold 135 to 140 of the 250 seats and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) about 105. A majority is 126. The election monitor CRTA’s preliminary count put the Student List at 51.

The right-populist franchise has received the most analytical attention, and fairly so — it is the more theatrically disruptive of the two. But the left operates its own franchise model, runs its own playbook, and is failing by the same internal logic: the substitution of ideological performance for material delivery. The symptoms differ. The structural disease is identical. The left franchise playbook is: centre your politics on solidarity rather than sovereignty, manufacture permanent victims rather than permanent enemies, and signal virtue to the coalition rather than outcomes to the electorate.

The short answer is that the European public would react badly to any “Growth First” agenda premised on welfare retrenchment — but the more interesting question is which publics, and on what timeline — because Europe is not a monolith, and the political economy of welfare retrenchment plays out very differently depending on where you are standing. The historical record on this is fairly unambiguous. Every serious attempt to structurally trim European welfare states — Schröder’s Agenda 2010, Sarkozy’s pension reforms, the austerity packages imposed on Greece, Portugal, and Spain after 2010 — generated fierce political backlash, often with lasting consequences.