There is a particular kind of politician who has never, in the entire course of his career, lost an election fairly. When he wins, it is the will of the people. When he loses, it is a coup, a plot, a “colour revolution” cooked up in a basement in Brussels, Langley or, for the more inventive, Kyiv, and paid for with George Soros’s loose change. The Kremlin has spent twenty years perfecting this excuse, and its friends abroad recite it with the word-perfect devotion of a choirboy who has been told there will be cake afterwards.
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.