Tonight they will be reaching for it again. Aleksandar Vučić, the strongman who has run Serbia for more than a decade, first as prime minister and then as president, has been beaten at the polls by a movement of students. Not by a party. Not by a rival oligarch. By students, led by a cardiologist called Ilija Srdanović, with a list of 250 candidates made up largely of professors, actors and farmers whom nobody had heard of a year ago. On preliminary results the Student List took around 52 per cent of the vote and somewhere between 135 and 140 of the 250 seats in parliament, a clear majority. Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party trailed on about 32 per cent. And Vučić, to his credit, conceded. I confess I did not expect him to. Strongmen are not, as a rule, gracious losers; they tend to regard elections the way a cat regards a bath, as something that happens to other creatures.

It is worth remembering how this began, because it began with something so ordinary that it ought to shame every government in Europe. On 1 November 2024 the concrete canopy over the entrance of the newly renovated railway station in Novi Sad collapsed, killing 16 people. Serbians, who are not fools, concluded that a station renovated at great public expense does not usually fall on people’s heads unless somebody, somewhere, has been pocketing the money. The students took to the streets, demanding transparency and justice. They were joined by their teachers, their parents, farmers, lawyers and pensioners. For nearly two years the protests rolled on, at times bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets of Belgrade, in what became the largest protest movement in the country’s modern history.

Vučić’s response was a masterclass in the Kremlin school of political management. The protesters, he said, were being manipulated by “foreign powers”. They were funded by foreign agents in Croatia and Montenegro. They were trying to “topple Serbia”. And his friends in Moscow helpfully chimed in. In the summer of 2025 Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, declared that “we cannot rule out that well-known methods are being used there to provoke colour revolutions”, and added, with touching faith, that “we have no doubt that the current Serbian leadership will be able to restore law and order”, which in Kremlin-speak generally means with truncheons. It is the same script Moscow has used about Georgia, about Armenia, about Moldova and, most famously, about Ukraine, where the Maidan revolution of 2014, in which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians stood in the snow for months to get rid of a president who had sold them out to the Kremlin, is still described on Russian television as a “Nazi coup” organised by the CIA. The idea that ordinary people might simply be fed up with corrupt and thuggish government does not seem to have occurred to anyone in the Kremlin. Perhaps because it is a thought that keeps them awake at night.

Well, the students of Serbia have now done something no coup ever does. They have won an election. It is a little hard to claim that a CIA plot has been carried out by a cardiologist and a list of village schoolteachers via the ballot box, though I have no doubt Russian state television will give it a go, probably with a diagram and a man in a fur hat pointing at it.

Vučić is not, I should say, a simple Kremlin puppet. He is something more slippery: a man who has spent years sitting on the fence between East and West, with one buttock in Brussels and the other in Moscow, collecting cheap gas from Russia, investment from China and accession talks from the EU, and promising each of them that he really loves them best, like a bigamist with three anniversaries and a very carefully kept diary. Serbia refused to join Western sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. In May 2025 Vučić turned up in Moscow for Putin’s Victory Day parade, which is not the sort of thing one does if one is trying to impress the European Commission. Moscow regarded him as its most dependable friend in the Balkans and a useful thorn in NATO’s side. And now he is gone, or at least about to be.

If you are keeping score, and in Kyiv we most certainly are, this has been a calamitous year for Putin’s friends.

In April, Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most devoted Kremlin admirer, was thrown out of office in Hungary after sixteen years. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won 138 of the 199 seats, a two-thirds constitutional majority, and Fidesz was reduced to 55. This was the man who had spent years blocking European aid to Ukraine, who trotted off to Moscow to talk oil and gas with Putin while the bombs fell on Kharkiv, so often that he must have qualified for Aeroflot gold status, and who was so cherished by the American right that JD Vance flew to Budapest to campaign for him. In January, as the polls turned against him, Orbán accused Ukraine of a “coordinated series of Ukrainian measures to interfere in the Hungarian elections” and summoned Kyiv’s ambassador. It is a measure of the man that he had decided, in advance, that if he lost, it would be Zelensky’s fault. He lost. The Hungarians seem to have concluded that the threat to their democracy was coming not from Kyiv but from the Prime Minister’s office.

In June, Armenia went to the polls with Moscow working openly against its Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, who has been edging his country away from Russia and towards Europe. Reuters reported, citing Western intelligence sources, that Russia had run a covert campaign to back pro-Russian candidates, and researchers tracked the same Storm-1516 disinformation network that has been busily spreading lies about Ukraine. Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party won anyway, with about 50 per cent of the vote and a majority of seats, against a pro-Russian bloc led by the billionaire Samvel Karapetyan. Karapetyan cried fraud, which is the democratic equivalent of kicking over the Monopoly board when your sister buys Mayfair. And Moscow, naturally, accused the West of interfering.

Notice a pattern? When the Kremlin’s candidates win, it is democracy. When they lose, it is Western interference. When the Kremlin interferes, it is protecting “compatriots”. The only constant is that the people who actually vote are never allowed to have made up their own minds. The Kremlin’s attitude to democracy is rather like a pub-quiz cheat’s attitude to the answer sheet: perfectly fair, so long as he is the one holding it.

So what does all this mean for Ukraine and the West? Potentially, a great deal. Orbán’s departure removes the single most effective saboteur of European support for Ukraine; for years Hungary’s veto held up sanctions packages and aid while Budapest bargained for concessions. A Serbian government elected on a platform of fighting corruption and cleaning up the state has every reason to look west rather than east, and Belgrade’s long, lazy flirtation with Moscow may finally end. Armenia is drifting steadily out of Russia’s orbit. Each of these defeats tells the Kremlin something it does not want to hear: that its soft power is curdling, that its gas no longer buys loyalty, and that people who have watched what Russia has done to Ukraine are not queuing up to be Moscow’s next “brother nation”.

But let us not get carried away. Putin still has friends in the club. Robert Fico runs Slovakia and has made a career out of opposing military aid to Kyiv. Andrej Babiš, no great enthusiast for arming Ukraine, returned to power in the Czech Republic last year. And then there is the friend Putin values above all others, who happens to live in the White House.

While Europe’s voters have been showing Putin’s allies the door, Donald Trump has been holding it open for Putin himself, with the eager deference of a hotel doorman who has been promised a very large tip. In August last year American soldiers knelt to smooth the red carpet for him in Anchorage. This month Trump came off the phone with the Kremlin having agreed to buy several million tonnes of Russian diesel, and his Treasury promptly suspended sanctions on Russian oil products that he had imposed only weeks earlier. When Zelensky objected, Trump accused him of not wanting peace and suggested Ukraine get “a new leader who can make a deal”. He has said he is open to Putin’s proposal for a summit with Xi Jinping in Shenzhen to settle the war, three men around a table with no Ukrainian in the room. His envoys are reported to be discussing a multibillion-dollar deal over Lukoil’s foreign assets with Moscow. And it was Trump who backed Orbán for re-election and sent his Vice President to Budapest to campaign for him, which tells you roughly what a Trump endorsement is worth on the European continent: about as much as a Ryanair apology. So while one by one Putin’s friends in Europe are being shown the door by their own voters, the most powerful man in the world has been busy hanging a welcome sign on his own. It is the one great consolation the Kremlin has left, and it is a very large one.

The other prize is now in sight.

In France, the country has spent the past month convulsed by riots, looting and a student protest movement of its own, which began, like Serbia’s, with complaints about crumbling public buildings. The difference is that in France the beneficiary looks like being not the students, but the far right. A poll published in Le Figaro last week put Marine Le Pen on 34 to 38 per cent in the first round of next April’s presidential election, and showed her beating Jean-Luc Mélenchon by 68 to 32 in a run-off. Le Pen’s party took a loan of more than €9 million from a Russian bank in 2014 and only finished paying it off in 2023. She once said she did not consider the annexation of Crimea illegal, flew to Moscow to be photographed with Putin a month before the 2017 election, and has opposed sending Ukraine long-range weapons. She has since condemned the invasion and softened her tone, as the polls required, in much the way a fox might take up vegetarianism shortly before applying for a job at the henhouse. But a Le Pen presidency would put a woman with a long record of sympathy for the Kremlin in charge of Europe’s only nuclear-armed member of the EU, its biggest military power and the country that has co-led Europe’s “coalition of the willing” for Ukraine. Losing Orbán would be a small price for Putin to pay for gaining the Élysée.

Here, then, is the lesson of 2026, and it is one Ukrainians learned long ago. Democracy is the one weapon Russia cannot match. Putin can bomb power stations, buy politicians, run bot farms and spread lies about yachts and Bugattis. What he cannot do is make people like him, which must be awfully galling for a man who has had himself photographed bare-chested on horseback for precisely that purpose. When ordinary people are allowed to vote freely, in Budapest, Yerevan or Belgrade, they keep choosing not to be ruled by his friends. That is why the Kremlin hates elections it cannot control, and why it insists, every time it loses one, that somebody else must have rigged it.

The students of Novi Sad began with a simple demand: that the people who let a roof fall on their neighbours be held to account. They have ended by bringing down a government, peacefully, at the ballot box. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about that. Somewhere in the Kremlin tonight, somebody will be drafting a statement about a Western-backed colour revolution.

I hope the students frame it.

Even by those standards, the past month has been something special. On Saturday 17 October, according to the Interior Ministry, 550,000 people marched in 110 cities across France; the organisers said 800,000. By nightfall Paris was full of tear gas, burning cars and smashed shopfronts. In Marseille protesters breached the town hall and looted shops, and a fire engine was set alight. In Lyon a tourist office was torched. In Limoges, the historic town hall was largely destroyed by fire. Around a thousand police officers and gendarmes were injured. Nearly 2,400 people were arrested in a single day, and more than 6,800 have been taken into custody since the trouble began, most of them minors. Riots have spread to Belgium and Italy. Donald Trump, never one to miss a European misfortune, announced that “France is burning!” For once, he was not entirely exaggerating.

It started with some teenagers complaining about their school.

On 21 September, pupils at the Lycée Antoine-de-Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, a suburb south-east of Paris, walked out the day after a teachers’ strike. Their grievances were not revolutionary. Teachers who had left were not being replaced. Classes were overcrowded. The buildings were crumbling. During the heatwave, classrooms had reportedly reached 40 degrees, which is roughly the temperature at which I start to lose the will to live, let alone revise for my baccalauréat. And there was Parcoursup, the dreaded national university-admissions algorithm, which reduces every French teenager’s future to a ranking on a website and which causes more anxiety among the young than anything since acne. The high-school union listed four demands: replace the missing staff, fix the “dilapidated” schools, lighten the overloaded timetables and do something about the stress of Parcoursup. If you can find anything sinister in that, you have a more fevered imagination than I do.

It spread like wildfire through the poorer suburbs of Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne, and then across the country. By the start of October more than a thousand lycées were affected. Then the trade unions joined in, then the university students, then the nurses and the firefighters and the farmers and the pensioners, and the protest about crumbling schools became a protest about everything: wages, pensions, prices, taxes, public services and a government that has borrowed so much money that France’s borrowing costs are at their highest in more than twenty years. And then, as night follows day and as surely as a Frenchman follows a strike, the remnants of the “yellow vest” movement turned up, followed by the people who were never interested in schools at all.

This is the depressingly familiar part, and it is not only French. I have watched it happen in city after city, cause after cause. A genuine grievance brings decent people on to the streets. Then, after dark, come the others: masked young men in black who have no interest whatsoever in the cause, except as cover. In 2011 a police shooting in Tottenham was the spark for riots across England, and within forty-eight hours the most urgent political demand of the rioters appeared to be a flat-screen television from Currys. In 2020 the killing of George Floyd sent millions of Americans out to protest peacefully against police brutality – them many of the people who joined them in the evenings took the opportunity to hunt down white business owners and clear out the local Apple store and Foot Locker. In 2023, after a police officer shot a teenager called Nahel in Nanterre, French suburbs burned for a week and the looters helped themselves to trainers and phones. Macron’s response at the time was to blame video games, which went down about as well as you would expect.

The pattern this time has been the same. At the Lycée Vauquelin in Paris, masked men attacked the school; the head teacher said not one of them was a pupil. Twenty-four schools had been burned or ransacked by early October, which is a curious way to campaign for better school buildings. And on 17 October, while half a million people marched peacefully, gangs in black smashed shopfronts and walked off with wine and electronics. I am sure they were deeply concerned about the shortage of maths teachers in Créteil. Nothing says “I care about the future of French education” like a stolen bottle of Bordeaux and a pair of trainers you will be wearing in a police cell by Monday.

I am going to be unfashionably blunt. A great many of the people who hijack these protests are not activists. They are bored, they are angry about nothing in particular, and they have discovered that burning a car is more entertaining than anything else on offer in their lives. Riot as a leisure activity. Arson as a hobby. It is a sort of grim extreme sport, live-streamed on TikTok, in which the prize is a new iPhone and the opportunity to post a video of a burning bus. It has no politics, no demands and no conscience, and every time it happens it wrecks the cause of the people who marched in good faith.

Not that the state has covered itself in glory either. Human rights groups have documented some appalling injuries to children: a 15-year-old in Lens who lost a hand to a police grenade, a 16-year-old in Tours who lost the use of an eye, apparently to a rubber bullet, a 14-year-old with a broken jaw. Amnesty International has called the use of force “disproportionate”, and the UN has asked France to calm down. The police watchdog is investigating. When you set out to stop teenagers blocking the gates of their own school and end up blinding them, something has gone badly wrong.

Which brings me to Emmanuel Macron, and here I must declare a bias. I like Macron. I have always rather liked him, in the way one likes a clever, faintly insufferable cousin who turns out to be right about most things. On the issue I care about most, he has been magnificent. When much of Europe dithered over Ukraine, Macron refused to rule out sending European troops, pushed for European rearmament, and has spent much of the past two years trying to build a “coalition of the willing” to defend Ukraine whether or not Washington bothers to turn up. In Kyiv, where I live, that counts for a great deal. He sees, as few European leaders do, that Russia is not a problem that will go away if we ignore it hard enough.

But Macron has a fatal flaw, and this crisis has exposed it brutally. He is very good at the big picture and hopeless at the small one. He can give a three-hour speech on European strategic autonomy without notes, but he seems never to have noticed that the roof of the school in Créteil was leaking. He governs like a philosopher-king from somewhere far above the clouds, the “Jupiterian” president of his own description, and for a month, while his country’s teenagers walked out of school in their hundreds of thousands, Jupiter stayed on Olympus. He has gone through prime ministers at a rate that would embarrass the Conservative Party. It was not until the country was on fire that he went on television, on Sunday 18 October, to express his “anger and shame”, promise that those who “destroyed, smashed and looted” would “pay for their crimes”, acknowledge that the protesters had “legitimate demands”, and announce that “lessons will be learned”. By Thursday he was blaming the “seditious” ultra-left for trying to “bring down the Republic” and banning protests in the centres of Paris, Lyon, Lille and Grenoble. He is not wrong about the ultra-left, and the government says its intelligence services describe the movement as partly organised by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, which denies it. But it is a little late to discover that schools matter when they are already alight.

Here is my angle, and it is not a cheerful one. The real winner of this autumn is neither the students, nor the unions, nor the looters, nor Macron. It is Marine Le Pen.

Le Pen has spent a decade presenting herself as the candidate of order, and every burning car on the evening news is a free party political broadcast. “We are experiencing a crisis of confidence,” she said this week, calling Macron “without credibility or authority” and condemning the “hijacking of this anger by thugs who are sowing chaos”. Her protégé, Jordan Bardella, told the French to “wake up” and make “the right political choices”. The French appear to be listening. A poll published in Le Figaro this week, taken hours after the riots, put Le Pen on 34 to 38 per cent in the first round of next April’s presidential election, double Mélenchon’s score, and showed her beating him by 68 to 32 in a run-off. In July a Paris appeal court upheld her conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds but cut her ban from office in a way that means she can stand, provided she can campaign in an electronic ankle tag. If that sounds like a minor inconvenience, consider that this time last year she was supposed to be out of the race altogether.

I have nothing against a French politician promising to restore order. What worries me is what else comes with Le Pen. In 2014 her party took a loan of more than €9 million from a Russian bank, the First Czech-Russian Bank, after French banks declined to lend to it; it was repaid only in 2023. She later said she did not consider the annexation of Crimea illegal. In 2017, a month before the first round of the presidential election, she flew to Moscow and was photographed with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. In 2022 her party had to pulp campaign leaflets showing her shaking his hand. She has since condemned the invasion of Ukraine and toned down her rhetoric, as the polls required, but she has opposed sending Ukraine long-range weapons and western troops, and her instinct has always been that France’s quarrel with Russia is somebody else’s business. A President Le Pen would not need to love Putin. She would only need to stop Macron’s coalition of the willing in its tracks, and Europe’s support for Ukraine would collapse like a soufflé in a draught.

So think about the chain of events. A group of teenagers in Créteil asked for a working roof and a maths teacher. Their protest was hijacked by the ultra-left and by thugs who wanted trainers and a bonfire. The thugs gave the far right the pictures it needed. The far right is now the favourite to win the presidency. And the presidency, in a few months’ time, may pass to a woman who once took Russian money, once said she did not consider the annexation of Crimea illegal and once flew to the Kremlin for a photograph. The looter in Paris who stole a pair of Nikes on Saturday night may have done more for Vladimir Putin than the entire staff of Russia Today.

What happens next? The unions are planning a national day of action on 5 November. The yellow vests are expected back on the streets this weekend. The bans on protests in city centres will be tested. Macron has convened his defence council, as though the enemy were foreign rather than sitting in his own lycées. The students, meanwhile, have gone on their autumn half-term holiday, which may do more to calm things than anything the government has managed, since nothing kills revolutionary fervour quite like a week at your grandmother’s in the Dordogne.

If Macron wants to rescue the last six months of his presidency, he could do worse than to go back to where this began. Fix the schools. Pay the teachers. Mend the roofs. Scrap or reform Parcoursup. Give the kids who started all this a win, and separate them, publicly and generously, from the people who burned down their schools in their name. That is how you take the oxygen away from Le Pen. Banning protests and blaming Mélenchon will not do it.

The French invented the modern idea of the citizen standing up to the state. It would be a bitter irony if this autumn’s revolution, which began with teenagers asking for a decent education, ended with France electing a president whose old friends live in the Kremlin. Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Or, as the looters would have it, liberté, égalité, Nike Air Max.

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