Serbia's students beat Vučić without any help from Brussels. Brussels had its congratulations out before the final count.

For an hour after the polls closed on Sunday night, Serbia held its breath. The electoral commission said nothing. The independent monitors said nothing. Riot vehicles were parked in central Belgrade, and the street to the commission building had been sealed off with metal barriers since before noon. Then every television channel in the country carried the same man saying the same thing.

"Based on a stratified sample, it is clear that we lost these elections," Aleksandar Vučić said, according to Politico Europe. The Student List, he said, would have between 135 and 140 of the 250 seats. His own party would have about 105.

Within minutes the crowds were in the streets chanting Gotov je!, "He's finished!" It was the refrain of October 2000, when Slobodan Milošević fell, the last time, Politico notes, that Serbians turned out in such numbers. History has a sense of humour. In 1998 Vučić was Milošević's information minister.

What actually won it

The numbers are not close. The Ipsos/CeSID projection put the Student List on 52 percent and Vučić's list on 39.3 percent, worth 138 seats against 104, the Guardian reports. Turnout was 67.6 percent by 7pm, the highest since Yugoslavia broke up.

It is worth being precise about who did this, because by Monday morning a lot of people will be claiming the credit.

The students did it. A movement born from the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad in November 2024, which killed 16 people, spent two years on the streets and then did the unglamorous part. It fielded 250 candidates, doctors, engineers, farmers, the basketball great Dejan Bodiroga, and went door to door in the rural towns that had voted for Vučić for a decade. Its slogan was "Serbia or Mafia?" Its manifesto, per the BBC, promised to purge officials who cracked down on protesters, stop party loyalists running state companies and free the public broadcaster from political control. Vučić and his party deny any corruption.

That is not a left-wing programme or a right-wing one. It is an honest-government programme, run under the national flag. Its candidates spoke the language of a hijacked country taken back, not of a membership application. "This will be a free state," the lead candidate, the cardiologist Ilija Srdanović, told BBC Serbian.

Notice what is missing. According to DW, the students' programme does not even mention EU membership.

The victory lap

Brussels did not let that get in the way. Before the final count was in, Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa had posted identical messages congratulating the Student List and promising to "work together to advance Serbia's future in the European Union". The enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, went further: "These are the very values at the heart of our European Union... The door to the EU is open."

The door has been open since 2012, when Serbia became a candidate. What came through it was a government that the V-Dem institute classes as an electoral autocracy, and a country that Reporters Without Borders now ranks 104th in the world for press freedom, last of the 40 countries in the EU and the Balkans, Politico notes. Serbia has not opened a single new negotiating cluster since December 2021. In July 2024, while Serbian activists were already protesting against a lithium mine in the Jadar valley, the Commission flew to Belgrade to sign a raw materials partnership with Vučić.

On Sunday, the European Parliament's own election observers had to be escorted around Belgrade by police. "Imagine what it's like for voters," said Raša Nedeljkov of the monitoring group CRTA.

So, yes, these are the values at the heart of the EU. They were also the values the EU was happy to set aside for fourteen years, for the sake of a strongman who picked up the phone. The voters who removed him did not need Brussels' door. They needed Brussels to stop holding his.

The trap ahead

Here is the risk. Brussels has a habit of treating every democratic win in the east as a branch office opening. Expect, within weeks, a list: align with Russia sanctions, settle Kosovo, sign off the lithium, adopt the acquis on time. The Guardian's live analysis already warns not to expect "an immediate move against Russia" from the new majority. Unlike Hungary's Péter Magyar, who congratulated the students on Sunday with a pointed "Sound familiar?", Serbia's winners are not openly pro-European and cannot expect a quick flow of EU money to buy them time, the Guardian adds.

If the Commission's first message to a leaderless list of political newcomers is a checklist, it will hand Vučić his comeback script. He spent two years calling the students stooges of foreign powers. Do not prove him right.

He will need a script. His gamble has a twist the Guardian spotted: by resigning the presidency to run for prime minister, Vučić left the office in the hands of an acting president, his ally Ana Brnabić, and Serbia now has to elect a new head of state before the end of the year. He may not enjoy that vote either.

The lesson nobody in Brussels will draw

On the same weekend, France counted more than 1,300 arrests after another round of protests, according to the BBC. In Belgrade, on streets where, as one 24-year-old told the Guardian, the police had beaten them, people were hugging officers. Serbia's students changed their government the old-fashioned way: patience, ballots and a flag. Nobody in Brussels designed it.

That is the lesson. Democracy in Europe is not a product the Commission ships to candidate countries. It is something nations do for themselves, usually against the people Brussels was courting. The best thing the EU can do for the new Serbia is to say well done, stand back and let Serbians decide what their future in Europe looks like. Gotov je. For once, Brussels should resist the urge to take a bow.