What Does Aleksandar Vucic’s Defeat Mean for Balkan Autocrats?

When the student protests in Serbia gathered momentum in 2025, Aleksandar Vucic, the president at the time, promised that he would defeat them and write a book on how to prevail against “colour revolutions” – an unmistakable allusion to Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, which unseated a corrupt administration. Instead, he may now have to write another book on how power is lost through arrogance, institutional capture and the mistaken belief that fear can substitute for legitimacy. His defeat in the snap parliamentary elections of October 25 is not merely a change of government; it represents a profound rejection of the model of autocratic governance he built over more than a decade. Yet this defeat did not occur in a vacuum. It followed nearly two years of student-led mobilisation that gradually expanded beyond universities and became one of the broadest civic movements in Serbia’s post-communist history.