Vučić's fall in Serbia mirrored Orbán's defeat in Hungary, as youth movements ousted both leaders

When they met in northern Serbia last November, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán could hardly have guessed they would both be out of power within a year. Both were ousted by popular movements.

Orbán fell first, in April, defeated by Péter Magyar's Tisza party. Then last Sunday a student movement less than two years old won Serbia's parliamentary elections by a landslide.

Hungary's Tisza party and Serbia's Student List look very different. Tisza is centred on the personality and energy of its leader, while the students in Serbia insist they have no leadership.

But the huge turnout in both countries — 79 percent in Hungary and 69 percent in Serbia — was driven by tech-savvy young people. They used AI tools to crunch numbers, identify threats to the vote, and mobilise tens of thousands of election monitors to prevent intimidation and electoral fraud by the governing parties.

Election monitoring techniques shared by Hungarian activists contributed to the result in Serbia. Last weekend, Hungary's DE civic action group sent 70 election monitors to Serbia, to work with the student movement's representatives visiting polling stations in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina. During the summer, even before the election was called, they held workshops to share their experience and methods from the Hungarian election with the Serbian students.

A key technique was to identify 'infected' polling districts in advance — places where the surprisingly high number of votes for the governing party at previous elections suggested that voter intimidation or 'chain voting' techniques had been used.

'From around 16:00 on election day, we noticed groups of masked hooligans — Vučić supporters — gathering near voting stations,' Péter Klemm, a student activist from Subotica, told the BBC. 'So we sent mobile teams, and started filming everything.' Combined with the stationary monitors already in place, 20 to 30 volunteers at each threatened polling station acted as a strong deterrent, he believes, and prevented intimidation or fraud.

Orbán in Hungary and Vučić in Serbia both looked invincible. The two powerful leaders, in office for 16 and 14 years, had taken over state institutions and established business empires overlapping the two countries. Almost a year ago, at a small, popular town-centre bakery in Subotica, Orbán chose cheese and Vučić meat over a quick lunch of traditional burek pastries. They continued to a local winery to talk about oil and other business deals, including the planned Hungarian purchase of Serbia's Nis oil refinery. The two nationalist leaders found much in common in business and politics, not least their friendship with Vladimir Putin in Russia and Chinese President Xi Jinping, and their strong support for Milorad Dodik, the separatist leader of the Bosnian Serbs. A high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest is also being built with Chinese finance and know-how.

The parallels between the two men's fall from power are extraordinary. Vučić admitted defeat at exactly 21:30 on Sunday evening, just as Orbán did on 12 April. Few observers expected either leader to concede peacefully. There has been speculation this week that Vučić spoke to Orbán twice on Sunday night to ask his advice — once before he conceded, and again at 23:15 — and that Orbán convinced his Serbian ally not to use force. Vučić denies that he spoke to Orbán before his announcement, but acknowledges the later conversation. Orbán, contacted by the BBC, declined to comment.

An hour before polls closed in Serbia, masked and hooded vigilantes took up position in central Belgrade. During voting, similar groups were photographed at many polling stations, and were blocked by election monitors.

There is another strange numerical similarity. The Student List will have 140 seats in the 250-seat Serbian parliament, the same number Péter Magyar's Tisza party won in the 199-seat Hungarian parliament. Magyar was the only European leader to ring the students directly to congratulate them that evening — and probably the only one who had their number. 'It is always good to hear that the story of Tisza could provide an inspiration for other nations,' the Hungarian prime minister told the BBC. 'The result of the Hungarian election clearly showed us that what we are doing here is right,' the head of the Student List, Ilija Srdanović, said on the eve of the vote. Srdanović was one of those Magyar spoke to that Sunday evening.

Orbán, 63, and Vučić, 56, may now both face prosecution for corruption and abuse of power. The judicial machinery in both countries is similar: Serbia's special prosecution service for organised crime, JTOK, and Hungary's brand new special prosecutors, known as NVVH, have similar powers and could prove useful to each other. Hungarian companies close to Orbán were also involved in the Novi Sad railway station construction project. The collapse of the station's canopy on 1 November 2024 — blamed on corruption as well as negligence — killed 16 people and acted as the catalyst for the Serbian student movement.

'There was a perception in Europe that the longer the Orbán and Vučić regimes stayed in office, the stronger they got,' Áron Timar, founder of the DE civic action group in Hungary, told the BBC. 'In fact they got weaker. And once society found its voice and rose up, there was no way of stopping it.'