What changed
Serbia’s student movement won parliamentary elections by a landslide, and President Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat at 21:30 on Sunday. The result followed Hungary’s April defeat of Viktor Orbán, creating an unusually close parallel between two long-serving nationalist leaders and the popular movements that unseated them.
Why it matters
The striking lesson is organisational. Serbia’s Student List and Hungary’s Tisza party are very different: Péter Magyar drives Tisza, while Serbian students insist they have no leader. But both campaigns turned young, tech-savvy voters into an election-day force.
Turnout reached 69% in Serbia and 79% in Hungary. Activists used AI tools to analyse numbers, identify vulnerable polling districts and organise monitors. Hungarian civic activists then shared those methods directly with Serbian student representatives, including through workshops and 70 monitors sent by the DE civic action group.
That cooperation mattered at polling stations. In Serbia, monitors filmed groups of masked men whom activists identified as Vučić supporters gathering near stations. Mobile teams joined stationary monitors, creating groups of 20 to 30 volunteers at threatened locations. The activists involved believe their presence deterred intimidation or fraud.
The political reversal is especially sharp because Vučić and Orbán had looked immovable. They had been in office for 14 and 16 years, respectively, while building overlapping political and business networks across their countries. They shared close ties with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Milorad Dodik, and backed projects including a Chinese-financed high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest.
Now the parallel has moved from friendship to succession. Orbán conceded on 12 April; Vučić followed at precisely 21:30 on Sunday. Claims that Vučić called Orbán twice that night for advice remain speculation. What is clear is that techniques developed in one opposition campaign helped shape the other.
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