Serbia’s election shows new vulnerability for nationalist populists

October 27, 2026 — 7:30pm

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Belgrade: When voters in Hungary rejected their seemingly invincible populist leader Viktor Orban in April, Andrej Borovac, a young designer in neighbouring Serbia, was ecstatic, but he was downbeat about his own country’s populist strongman suffering the same fate.

“That can never happen here,” he recalled thinking. Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s dominant political figure since 2012, looked immovable, given his grip – established over more than a decade in power – on security forces, nearly all major media outlets, the electoral commission and many other institutions. Or so he thought.

On Sunday night (Belgrade time), Borovac, 38, and two friends joined tens of thousands of people gathered near parliament in the Serbian capital to celebrate Vucic’s defeat in a pivotal election for a new legislature.

“The Hungarian Spring has come to Serbia in the fall,” Borovac said late on Sunday night, surrounded by revellers waving Serbian flags and setting off red flares. Nearby, a group of young Serbs danced for joy.

At a time of rising liberal fears of surging support for right-wing nationalists, the formerly communist East, an early pioneer of populist politics after the collapse of Soviet hegemony in 1989, is showing that tides can turn.

Elections this year in Hungary and Serbia, and in Poland in 2023, have given new life to mostly forgotten liberal hopes voiced in The Power of the Powerless, a 1978 book by Václav Havel, the Czech dissident who would later become president and a global icon for believers in liberal democracy.

Anger at rampant corruption helped glue together disparate and sometimes contradictory political forces, allowing them to campaign on an issue that resonated with a wider population upset by the conspicuous wealth of people connected to the governing party.

In Germany, France and Italy, and elsewhere in Western Europe, the anti-establishment nationalist camp has taken on the appearance of an invincible juggernaut, and it may yet show strongly in a raft of elections next year.........

© The Age