What lessons should other autocrats in the region learn from Vučić's defeat?

When student protests took off in 2025, Aleksandar Vučić promised to defeat them and write a book on how to win against "color revolutions," a clear allusion to the Ukrainian Maidan.

Instead, he can now write another book: how power is lost through arrogance, institutional capture, and the mistaken belief that fear can forever replace legitimacy. His defeat in the October 25 snap parliamentary elections does not simply represent a change of government; it represents a profound political rejection of the autocratic model of governance that he built over more than a decade.

But this defeat did not occur in a vacuum. It followed nearly two years of student-led mobilization, which gradually expanded beyond universities and became one of the broadest civic movements in Serbia's post-communist history.

Students gave the movement moral authority, organizational discipline, and a language of accountability; but its strength lay in its ability to unite teachers, farmers, professionals, local activists, and citizens in small towns and cities across the country. What began as a protest against corruption and impunity grew into a broader rejection of a political system that turned fear, patronage, and institutional capture into tools of governance.

How the Serbian autocracy was built

Contemporary autocracy does not necessarily arise from a single party or ideology. It is constructed as a coordinated network of control over money, the media, security services, and public institutions, with an overarching goal – the preservation of permanent power, enrichment, impunity, and protection from democratic change.

In Serbia, this model was imposed through repeated elections and the legalization of state capture. The administration, public enterprises, judiciary, media, and constitutional bodies gradually became extensions of the Serbian Progressive Party and its leader.

The system was based on three pillars. First, the separation of powers was destroyed, subjecting the judiciary, the prosecution, the Assembly, and other constitutional bodies to the logic of loyalty, while the law was applied selectively – to punish opponents and protect the privileged beneficiaries of power.

Second, a political economy of patronage was built, in which public contracts, licenses, appointments, and state resources rewarded loyalty and financed the electoral and propaganda apparatus. International observers documented the use of public enterprise resources in the SNS campaign, while dozens of television stations, mostly regional media outlets, broadcast Vučić’s speeches in their entirety during prime time – a clear asymmetry of public resources in favor of the ruling party.

Third, the information space was colonized, with public media and a significant portion of private media placed under political control, while opponents were portrayed as traitors, foreign agents, or representatives of violent groups intent on seizing power. This was the essence of Vučić’s “stability” – not the autonomy of institutions, but the inability of citizens to challenge those who controlled them.

The darkest dimension of this system emerged, however, when the government confronted the student movement. Instead of responding with arguments, institutional dialogue, and reform, it responded with delegated violence and police inertia. Across Serbia, masked men in black robes, hats, and face-covering masks attacked protesters, beat up business owners who supported the students, and attacked the headquarters of political opponents.

In Valjevo, masked pro-government groups damaged cafes associated with the protest movement and attacked citizens who supported them. In Novi Pazar, masked individuals entered the State University and violently evicted students who had been protesting inside the building for months; the police did not intervene and, subsequently, prevented the students from returning to the faculty. These were not isolated excesses. They revealed a system in which repression was privatized while violence was delegated to groups connected to power, while state institutions retreated into silence.

Within this architecture, the police did not protect the constitutional order; they protected Vučić’s political power. They used tear gas and violence against students in Novi Sad, while violent pro-government groups often acted without consequences. There were mass arrests, excessive use of force during protests, and detention. Senior regime officials encouraged and legitimized violence against protesters; the fact that Vučić pardoned four SNS-affiliated individuals accused of attacking students in Novi Sad only reinforces this conclusion. Herein lies the clearest evidence that Vučić’s Serbia was not a flawed rule of law state, but a state in which law, police, and violence served as instruments of the same political project.

In this architecture, elections were not an ordinary mechanism for transferring power; they were an instrument for legitimizing it. They were held regularly, but under deeply unequal conditions. The opposition faced constant asymmetric access to the media, while Vučić and his allies exploited public resources, exerted pressure on public sector employees, and built an electoral apparatus that transformed the state into a voting machine. Yesterday's defeat is therefore of great importance, because it shows that even such a system can be broken when citizens refuse to submit to fear.

Why Vučić will have a hard time in opposition

The political irony is considerable, as the fate of Vučić, the SNS and their allies will now depend precisely on the independence of the institutions they themselves had dismantled for loyalty. As the opposition and as a political alternative, they will depend on the space they are given in the Serbian Parliament, the institution they had transformed into a circus and a stage to humiliate, subjugate and eliminate a fragmented opposition.

They will also depend on media freedom. For years, pro-government media, whether public or private, gave Vučić a monopoly on the narrative and denied the opposition and student movement the opportunity to be heard without being labeled traitors, foreign agents, or violent groups. Now, the same propaganda machine must accept equal rules, transparency, and daily oversight. For a regime built on information control, this represents the loss of a strategic asset and weapon.

Most importantly, Vučić will depend on an independent judiciary and prosecution to protect him from political retaliation, which under the SNS rarely dealt with allegations of abuse of power and massive corruption by regime figures. If the justice institutions regain even a degree of independence, political wealth, shady contracts, violence against protesters, and electoral abuses could become the subject of investigation. But this outcome is not guaranteed. The new government may lack the will or capacity to pursue accountability; the independence of the judiciary may remain fragile; and SNS networks may continue to exert influence at the local level. Vučić’s loss creates the possibility of oversight, not its certainty.

It will also depend on whether the new government refuses to use state instruments to win elections – a practice that Vučić has systematically employed in repeated cycles of parliamentary, presidential and local elections. Other autocrats must understand that the political system they have built and the institutional mechanisms they have used to make themselves invincible while in power leave them exposed the moment they lose power.

What does the “Student List” represent?

The Student List is not simply an anti-Vučić force; it is a movement born from protests against corruption, state capture, and lack of accountability following the 2024 tragedy in Novi Sad. Its program emphasizes fighting corruption, reforming the administration, freeing public media from political control, and banning the appointment of party loyalists to the top of public enterprises. Domestically, then, it represents a demand for the return of the state to the citizens, through independent institutions, the rule of law, free media, and an end to governance through fear and patronage.

In foreign policy, the Student List’s profile is more cautious and complex. It reaffirms Serbia’s military neutrality, declared as early as 2007, before the SNS came to power. It sees the European Union primarily as Serbia’s most important economic partner and advocates deepening strategic relations with EU member states, but the program contains no clear commitment to EU membership. This ambiguity matters. It suggests that Serbia’s European orientation may remain transactional and economic, rather than transformative or geopolitical; approximation to European standards may be pursued selectively, where it serves the national interest, rather than embraced as an overarching political project.

Regarding Kosovo, the Student List maintains the position that it is an integral part of Serbia and that it will oppose both its independence and its membership in international organizations. Its program foresees the review of the agreements reached in the Brussels dialogue and the possibility of criminal prosecution of those who, according to it, have signed anti-state agreements; at the same time, it demands broad autonomy for municipalities with a Serbian majority and the protection of Serbian cultural, educational and religious institutions in Kosovo. This position clearly excludes the recognition of Kosovo's independence or the full normalization of relations. It represents a rigid stance, anchored in the spirit of the Serbian Constitution and in UN Security Council Resolution 1244.

The consequences for Kosovo are, therefore, nuanced. Vučić’s defeat may reduce the aggression and theatricality that characterized Serbian politics during his rule, but it does not change the antagonistic approach of the Student List. A calmer Belgrade is not necessarily a more flexible Belgrade. For Kosovo, the challenge would be to test whether a new Serbian government is willing to separate pragmatic cooperation from maximalist constitutional rhetoric – and to avoid the mistake of confusing a change of tone with a change of policy.

Towards Bosnia and Herzegovina, the program defends the constitutional status and competences of Republika Srpska, including its veto rights within joint institutions, and opposes the powers of the High Representative. Towards Montenegro, it calls for improving the status of the Serb population and protecting its identity, while towards Croatia it emphasizes the rights of Serbs and the issue of returns. Consequently, for Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro, Vučić’s defeat could bring a reduction in tension and aggressive rhetoric in the short term – a space for internal consolidation and reform without the constant security pressure imposed by Belgrade. But this does not mean that the new authorities in Belgrade will automatically become constructive partners towards their neighbors or that they will respect their territorial integrity.

Lesson for the region

For the region’s other autocrats, Vučić’s loss is bitter news. Those who supported him for years, imitated his rhetoric, or considered him a strategic ally against democratic pressure will now be more isolated and vulnerable within their own societies. Viktor Orbán’s fall in Hungary and Vučić’s loss in Serbia have weakened the Orbán-Vučić-Dodik axis, which for years functioned as a mutually reinforcing network of political, ideological, and diplomatic support among authoritarian leaders in Central and Southeast Europe. This does not mean that authoritarian networks have disappeared; it means that their most visible and coordinated expression has lost two of its central pillars.

The Serbian model proved that even a sophisticated system of control, built through captured media, subservient courts, delegated violence, and rigged elections, can be broken when citizens refuse to submit to fear. This is not just news for Serbia; it is a warning to every leader in the region who has built power on the same foundations.

The lesson is not that students can overthrow any regime overnight. The deeper lesson is that no apparatus built on fear, violence, controlled media, subservient courts, and plunder of public property can permanently extinguish citizens’ demand for dignity, accountability, and freedom. When corruption becomes the rule and when the state is transformed into the private property of a political caste, even the longest “stability” carries within itself the seeds of its own crisis.

The countries of the region should welcome the possibility of a calmer and more responsible Serbia, but without illusions about an immediate change in its policy towards them. At the same time, they should protect democratic standards at home, because the overthrow of an autocrat does not in itself guarantee democracy; democracy is only ensured when institutions, media and citizens defend it every day. Reporter.al