By Sarah Caldwell
Serbia’s Students for the Win!
A new era in Serbian politics began this month as the ‘Student List’ campaign ousted authoritarian president Aleksandar Vučić after 12 years. Pollsters and the election commission put turnout close to 70%, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992. The student list won 140 seats in parliament while Vučić’s party won only 103. The student list will now hold a majority of seats in the Serbian parliament.
The Serbian student movement began in November 2024 shortly after a concrete canopy collapsed at the Novi Sad railway station, killing 16 people. Protests over evidence of slipshod construction, fraud, and corruption behind the roof collapse eventually turned into a broad, anti-government, student-run movement that spread across the country.
Student-led protests grew bigger and bigger, taking over the capital city of Belgrade, until Vučić finally agreed to resign the presidency last month and gamble on snap elections. The students then took their movement to the ballot box, enlisting 250 candidates to run in this month’s election, one for each seat in parliament. The candidates came from all walks of life and included athletes, academics, and farmers who campaigned in every province.
Together with the students, the candidates campaigned on rebuilding Serbia’s economy and restoring its democracy after twelve years of authoritarian rule. They faced an uphill battle, however, against an SNS that controlled nearly every broadcast channel and wielded ministries and other state institutions as political tools. Vučić, for his part, repeatedly accused the students of serving foreign interests, a charge they have vehemently denied.
In the weeks before the election, the students and their candidates gained momentum. They staged the largest rallies the country had ever seen and carried their campaign into Vučić’s rural strongholds under a blunt slogan: “Serbia or Mafia.” What began as weekly protests on university campuses had grown into something new in Serbian politics, a hopeful and welcoming movement that was also winning.
A longtime political and economic ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Vučić borrowed a move from Putin’s own playbook ahead of the vote, resigning the presidency to run for prime minister. Despite a last-minute push of cash handouts and promises of higher pensions, new roads, and cheaper medicine, the grassroots movement still brought him down.
In another move, this one reminiscent of his former Hungarian ally Viktor Orbán, Vučić quickly conceded defeat, a sign that a democratic resurgence may truly be reaching Central Europe.
“Today, above all, Serbia is fighting for freedom and for the return of a country that has been hijacked,” Dejan Bodiroga, one of the students’ successful candidates, told the Guardian. “Serbia is voting today to decide which direction it will take – towards the future or the past.”
Brazil swings left against the odds
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) of Brazil’s Workers’ Party was re-elected this month in a come-from-behind victory. After losing the first round to far-right challenger and Trump ally Flávio Bolsonaro, Lula beat Bolsonaro by gaining 5 percentage points to win the second round in an unprecedented shift in voter turnout. Nearly 3 million more Brazilians voted in the second-round runoff compared to the first round on October 4th, recording the largest drop in voter abstention between election rounds since 1989.
“I wanted to thank the Brazilian people for the generosity they have shown me for a long time,” Lula said in his acceptance speech. “And in this second round, I want to thank the Brazilian youth for their generosity in taking to the streets. They took to the streets to defend democracy in the country.”
Much of the credit for the turnaround went to these young voters and to André Janones, a young federal deputy who mobilized ten million of them on WhatsApp in the weeks before the runoff. Janones hails from the swing state of Minas Gerais, which shifted more toward Lula between the two rounds than any other state. Through a message of representation and unity spread across social media, he helped Lula secure ten million more votes in the second round than in the first.
Flávio Bolsonaro initially refused to recognize the results and demanded that the vote be annulled. His objection centered on a last-minute court decision to extend voting hours in several states hit by heavy rain, granted at Lula’s campaigns’ request, which cited transportation difficulties. Yet the Bolsonaro campaign had made the very same request, citing heavy rain in southern Brazil.
Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, changed his tune after his own party (the Liberal Party) officially recognized Lula’s victory. The next day he took to social media with a new strategy: seeking to have Lula’s ticket disqualified by alleging “vote-buying” through the abuse of public funds during the final weeks of the campaign.
That same day, US President Donald Trump, long-time friend and ally of the Bolsonaro family, commented on the elections to reporters, “I didn’t take sides, but it looked like another rigged election.” Neither he nor Flavio presented any evidence for their claims.
Bolsonaro took to social media again this week, announcing that Brazil’s Federal Police had confiscated his passport (for a money laundering inquiry entirely separate from the election) while he was visiting his father, who is currently under humanitarian house arrest, serving a 27-year sentence for an attempted coup on Lula’s government in 2023. Flávio, the son, has since fled the country to stay with his brother in Florida.
Even so, Lula still faces challenges. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party made significant gains in Congress, leaving Lula facing a conservative opposition and a deeply divided electorate. Lula must also solve the country’s mounting debt crisis, implement new, sweeping tax reforms, and tackle high interest rates and sticky inflation.
The next four years will be economically difficult for Brazil, along with every other country in Latin America. But at least Lula has put a forceful pause on a run of right-wing electoral victories across the country, and that will surely keep the moment moving in his direction.
Two down, two to go
In what is now being dubbed the ‘4 big elections in 10 days that will reshape global politics’, Brazil and Serbia have both shown strong evidence that high voter turnout can suppress both authoritarianism and the influence of far-right strongmen like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Israeli elections also saw the highest turnout in two decades, giving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition hope of finally ousting the country’s longest-serving Prime Minister. Preliminary exit polls did not show a clear winner but appeared to give the opposition bloc of parties led by Gadi Eisenkot a slight edge over Netanyahu’s governing coalition. The final vote count will not be announced until the end of the month, and even then it will likely take several weeks (or months) for a clear coalition winner to emerge.
The results of elections both in Israel and in the United States will surely have significant implications for the ongoing conflicts in Gaza and in Iran and for politics globally. Stay tuned for next month’s special edition of Recently In Politics for a deep dive on US midterm election results.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and may not reflect the opinions of The St Andrews Economist.
Image Credit: BBC