Strongmen Fall, Ballot Boxes Beckon: Mind the Gap

Sixteen people died under a station canopy in Novi Sad on 1 November 2024, and the corruption and negligence blamed for it ended up toppling a man who'd ruled Serbia with an iron fist since 2017. Today, on the second anniversary of the collapse, Aleksandar Vucic is the outgoing president, beaten by a student movement less than two years old. The Student List won last Sunday's parliamentary election by a landslide and will hold 140 seats in the 250-seat parliament.

Vucic resigned the presidency just before the vote so he could stand as prime minister, a post he held from 2014 to 2017. A neat trick: change the chair, keep the table. It didn't work. He conceded at exactly 21:30 on election night, the same minute-precise choreography Viktor Orban performed on 12 April when Peter Magyar's Tisza party beat him in Hungary.

Who Was Watching the Polling Stations

The mobilisation didn't come from a ministry or a party machine. Tech-savvy young people in Hungary and Serbia used AI tools to crunch numbers, identify threats to the vote, and organise tens of thousands of election monitors. Turnout reached 79% in Hungary and 69% in Serbia. The DE civic action group in Hungary sent 70 monitors across the border to polling stations in the northern province of Vojvodina.

Peter Klemm, a student activist from Subotica, described election day to the BBC: "From around 16:00 on election day, we noticed groups of masked hooligans - Vucic supporters - gathering near voting stations. So we sent mobile teams, and started filming everything." Nobody asked permission. They filmed, and they kept filming.

There's a question about what happened after dark. Speculation holds that Vucic spoke to Orban twice that night, once before conceding and again at 23:15, and that Orban talked him out of using force. Vucic denies the earlier call but admits the later one. Orban, contacted by the BBC, declined to comment. Whatever was said, the sentence worth sitting with is the speculation itself: whether force was an option on the table for a man who'd held office for 14 years.

Who Funds the Friends

Vucic called himself and Trump like-minded people. Donald Trump Jr. visited Belgrade shortly before the US presidential election in November 2024, and again a few months later. CPAC, closely connected to the MAGA movement, announced a Belgrade meeting this November with Vucic as keynote speaker. Whether it still happens is unclear. Keynote speakers are harder to book once they've lost.

Vucic also never joined EU countries in sanctioning Russia after its war of aggression against Ukraine. Belgrade still buys Russian raw materials, and Serbian state media under Vucic painted a warmer picture of Russia than of the EU. Steve Witkoff recently called Putin a "humanitarian," and Trump admitted he gets on better with Putin than with Zelenskyy. The courtiers of the powerful keep trading compliments across borders, and the ones holding the ballots keep complicating the arrangement.

Brazil: The Same Script, Different Hemisphere

In Brazil, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva won as incumbent. The Trump camp had wanted Flavio Bolsonaro. Flavio is under investigation for alleged corruption and money laundering. After losing, he fled to Florida, where the US State Department granted him and his family entry visas. Note who gets a visa without a fuss, and who doesn't.

Bolsonaro has refused to concede, claiming irregularities. Trump said on Monday: "It looked like another rigged election, frankly. Elections have to be indisputable – and it looked very bad to me." Lawrence J. Haas of the American Foreign Policy Council expects relations to "remain cool at best," since Trump "doesn't feel warmly toward Lula."

After the Vote

Orban, 63, and Vucic, 56, may now face prosecution for corruption and abuse of power. May. The word carries the weight of every ruler who ever left office with the keys to the ministry archives. Student List leader Ilija Srdanovic said on the eve of the vote: "The result of the Hungarian election clearly showed us that what we are doing here is right." Magyar, now Hungary's prime minister, was the only European leader to phone the students that evening. He told the BBC: "It is always good to hear that the story of Tisza could provide an inspiration for other nations."

Aron Timar, founder of the DE civic action group, offered the line that matters: "There was a perception in Europe that the longer the Orban and Vucic regimes stayed in office, the stronger they got. In fact they got weaker. And once society found its voice and rose up, there was no way of stopping it."

Note the order of events. A canopy fell. Students organised. Monitors filmed. A strongman conceded. A ballot was the last step, not the first. The parliament seats come next, and so does the question every winning movement faces: what a government built on 140 seats does with the machinery it inherits.

The US midterms land on Tuesday, 3 November 2026. Haas says Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president on the eve of a midterm since Harry Truman in 1946, with Americans worried about affordability and strongly opposed to the US-Iran war. In Israel, with more than 96% of votes counted, Netanyahu's right-wing bloc leads but has lost its majority. Another night, another count.