As polling stations closed across Serbia on Sunday evening, riot police were deploying around the presidency in Belgrade. Many of us feared the worst: massive electoral fraud, a refusal to recognise defeat or outright violence. After nearly 15 years of Aleksandar Vučić’s increasingly authoritarian rule, a peaceful transfer of power seemed implausible.

I had good reason to feel afraid. I am co-founder of an annual conference on the security and foreign policy challenges shaping the western Balkans, and sit on the international advisory committee of a civil society thinktank, the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy. Such work would be uncontroversial in most countries seeking European Union membership. Under Vučić’s regime, it was anything but.

Over the past two years, our organisation has faced cyber-attacks by actors suspected of links to Russian intelligence, spyware attempts and relentless vilification by pro-regime media. After one attack, investigators documented 28,000 email exchanges that had been hacked. At the same time, Serbian regime propagandists portrayed us as foreign conspirators, while the threat of Russian-style foreign agents legislation cast a long shadow over all of Serbian civil society. Had Vučić won another mandate, exile might have become a reality for many of us.

Others endured far worse. Journalists and activists had their homes set on fire. Students who were detained reported being beaten, females stripped naked and humiliated in police stations while activists were imprisoned for exercising........

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