Serbia's Vučić Concedes to the Student Movement, Then Blames Europe and the 'Deep State'

Aleksandar Vučić has dominated Serbian politics since 2012. On Sunday night, about 90 minutes after the polls closed, he walked up to a podium at his party's headquarters in Belgrade and said the words nobody expected to hear from him: "Based on the stratified sample, it is clear that we have lost these elections."

The winner is the Student List, the movement that grew out of two years of street protests after a train station canopy in Novi Sad collapsed and killed 16 people. Vučić quit the presidency last month to run for prime minister. Instead, he is headed for the opposition benches.

The numbers

Serbia's two big independent monitors called it the same way. The Ipsos/CeSID projection, based on 56% of its polling-station sample, put the Student List at 52% and Vučić's "Aleksandar Vučić – United Serbia" list at 39.3%. That works out to about 139 seats for the students and 104 for Vučić in the 250-seat National Assembly. A majority takes 126.

The observer group CRTA had it at 51.47% to 40.42% in its own preliminary data. Ivica Dačić's Socialists, Vučić's longtime coalition partner, fell under the 3% threshold and are out of parliament. Only minority lists, which are exempt from the threshold, got in alongside the two big blocs.

Vučić's own math matched. "The student-blockader list has won," he said, using his camp's name for the protesters. "It will have between 135 and 140 seats, and we about 105. No one else got into parliament."

One caution: these are projections, not the final count. The Republic Electoral Commission's first official tally, built from about 200 polling stations, still had Vučić's list ahead. Early returns don't always look like the finish line, and Vučić conceded on the sample himself.

How he got here

Think of it like a landlord who ignores a cracked beam for years, and then the porch falls on the tenants. On Nov. 1, 2024, the newly renovated canopy at the Novi Sad station came down, and the questions about who signed off on the work never went away. Students blockaded universities. Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned in January 2025, citing attacks on students in Novi Sad. In March 2025, an estimated 325,000 people filled Belgrade.

The students turned their demand for accountability into a demand for elections, and then into a ballot line. Vučić dissolved parliament on Sept. 9 and resigned as president on Sept. 27 to lead his party's list, according to the OSCE's election observers. Speaker Ana Brnabić became acting president.

The two sides ran on very different things. The OSCE observers wrote that United Serbia campaigned on "stability, economic growth and foreign policy," while the Student List focused "mainly on anti-corruption, framing the elections as a referendum on the future direction of the country."

What the observers flagged

Vučić's side had every advantage money can buy. The OSCE's interim report noted a budget revision at the end of August that sent one-off payments to adult citizens "totalling almost EUR 1 billion," and a "significantly disproportionate resource advantage enjoyed by the ruling party." It still wasn't enough.

Election day was messy, too. CRTA's observers reported ballots being photographed at 48% of polling stations, UV-lamp checks skipped at 30%, and people voting without valid ID at 8%. Turnout hit 67.8% by 7 p.m., CRTA said, an unusually high number for a Serbian election.

Blaming Washington's 'deep state'

Vučić didn't go quietly. In the same address, he called the result "the verification of the revolution" that his opponents "carried out with the direct support of various European countries and the deep American state, the one that is against President Trump."

He didn't name a single American official, agency or dollar amount to back that up. It is not a new line, either. On Sept. 29, the OSCE report notes, Vučić went on TV Informer and accused a domestic election-monitoring group of representing "Western services" and joining a "colour revolution."

Here is the problem with borrowing Trump's vocabulary on the way out the door. The Trump movement was built on voters firing an entrenched political class that had stopped listening to them. On Sunday, Serbian voters did exactly that, at the ballot box, in long lines, against a man who had been in power since 2012. Invoking Trump's name doesn't change who did the voting.

He also tried to claim a consolation prize: his list won "everywhere Serbs live" outside Serbia, he said, naming Republika Srpska, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo. Then, to the supporters in the room: "I know that for many people tonight it's hard. I know how much some are rejoicing."

What's next

Monday. The OSCE observer mission presents its preliminary findings, and CRTA gives its election-day assessment at a 1 p.m. press conference in Belgrade.

The count. The Republic Electoral Commission keeps counting toward official results. Watch whether the final seat total holds near the 139 projection or slips toward the 126 line.

A government. The Student List has to turn a protest movement into a cabinet. It ran with no leader's name on its ballot line, so who becomes prime minister is the first big question.

Another election. Serbia's constitution caps an acting presidency at three months, so a presidential vote has to come by late December. Vučić can't run for a third term. The student movement now gets a second shot at the top job.

The bottom line: a strongman who controlled the TV channels, the state budget and the parliament lost anyway, and he admitted it the same night. That part deserves credit. The "deep state" excuse does not.