Vucic Concedes Serbia to the Student List Six Months After Orban Fell in Hungary
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 51.5 percent and Vučić’s United Serbia list at 40.2 percent.
That ends fourteen years of SNS rule. It also ends a gamble Vučić made a month earlier. On Sept 27 he resigned the presidency eight months before his second term ran out, to head his party’s list as its candidate for prime minister. The constitution barred a third presidential term, and the premiership carries more formal power anyway. He gave up the office he had to win the one he wanted, and lost both.
Turnout tells the story of how it happened. By 6 pm it stood at 64.9 percent, against 51.93 percent at the same hour in 2023. People who had sat out Serbian elections for a decade came back to vote him out.
The second franchise to close this year
Policymaker.net has argued since spring that the Orbán model works like a franchise: capture the courts and the media first, then keep winning elections on a field that’s been tilted in advance. Viktor Orbán lost Hungary on April 12, when Péter Magyar’s Tisza won a two-thirds majority. Now the Belgrade location has closed too.
The two cases share a cause. Neither leader was beaten by a party that looked like the old opposition. Magyar came out of Fidesz’s own world. The Student List grew out of the protests after the Novi Sad station canopy collapsed on Nov 1 2024 and killed 16 people, and its ballot is made up of experts, farmers, athletes and artists. None of the students who led the marches are on it. Both movements made the vote about competence and corruption, and both reached voters well outside the capital.
The incumbents also lost the same way. Vladimir Putin endorsed Vučić. It didn’t help. Vučić then blamed a “revolution” backed by European governments and by an American “deep state” hostile to President Trump, which tells you which foreign friends he thought he still had.
The field was still tilted on the day. CRTA said voters photographing their ballots, a common sign of pressure on voters, was more widespread than at any earlier Serbian election, and it found the practice at 80 percent of the Belgrade polling stations it monitored. Two journalists were attacked near Vranje. The opposition won anyway, by a margin that made the irregularities beside the point.
What the new majority inherits on day one
The Student List takes over a state with two hard energy deadlines, and neither is in Belgrade’s hands.
The first is NIS, which runs Serbia’s only oil refinery. Washington sanctioned it in 2025 because its majority owner is Russian. Hungary’s MOL is negotiating to buy the 56.15 percent Russian stake, and the US Treasury license that lets those talks go on runs only to Oct 30. The second is gas. Gazprom supplies about three quarters of what Serbia burns, there has been no long-term contract since mid-2025, and the stopgap runs to Dec 31.
A government that hasn’t been formed yet can’t negotiate either one. After the 2023 vote it took until May 2024 to put a cabinet together. The new majority is bigger and simpler this time, but it is a citizens’ list with no governing record, and a presidential election also has to be held by Dec 27 to replace Vučić in the office he left. Ana Brnabić, the assembly speaker and his close ally, is acting president until then.
So the first test is administrative. Can a protest movement keep the refinery running and the heating on through January while it builds a ministry? If it can, Serbia’s EU candidacy, stalled for years, starts to look like a live file again. If it can’t, Vučić’s camp will say the students couldn’t govern, and that line will sell.
What this doesn’t settle
Elections are the easy part of ending a franchise. In Hungary the harder question is whether Magyar can rebuild courts and prosecutors that can actually hold the old system to account, and the same question now lands in Belgrade. The SNS still holds about 105 seats, a party machine in every town and the loyalty of much of the state it ran for fourteen years.
Serbia also sits where Hungary didn’t: outside the EU, with a Russian-owned refinery and a gas supplier in Moscow. The student vote changes who answers those phone calls. It doesn’t change who is calling.
Sunday’s result showed the model can lose. What comes after the concession will show whether it can be taken apart.