A Serbian Nationalist Leader Who Courted MAGA Just Lost in a Landslide

People celebrate after Serbian nationalist leader Aleksandar Vucic conceded defeat in the parliamentary election in Belgrade, Serbia, on Sunday.Armin Durgut/AP Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Serbian strongman Aleksandar Vucic, a nationalist who has cultivated ties to Donald Trump and Vladmir Putin and has downplayed his country’s 1990s war crimes, conceded defeat in elections Sunday to a slate of candidates backed by a student-led anti-corruption movement. The result has broad similarities to Hungarian opposition leader Péter Magyar’s April defeat of longtime Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Vucic, like Orban, ginned up nationalist sentiments and worked to link his cause to Trump’s. Serbia, following in Hungary’s footsteps, plans to host a gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. Far-right influencers from the US flocked to Belgrade in recent days to support Vucic. He has enjoyed support from MAGA figures like Donald Trump Jr, who last year used his podcast to conduct a fawning interview with the Serbian president. And Vucic has employed Trumpworld lobbyists who have described Serbs as “pro-Trump Christians”—a characterization that distinguishes them from the Muslims in nearby Bosnia and Kosovo who suffered under past Serbian aggression. Vucic in recent years has backed away from acknowledging Serbian war crimes in the 1990s. Last month he allowed Ratko Mladic—a Serb general convicted of genocide by an international tribunal for overseeing the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which more than 8,000 Bosnians were executed—to be buried with military honors in the Serbian capital. Vucic also reportedly pressed government officials to help advance a plan pushed by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to build a $500 million hotel complex in Belgrade, in what Serbian critics called an illegal effort to placate the American president’s family. Vucic has dominated Serbian politics since 2012, serving previously as both president and prime minister, the job he was attempting to return to after stepping down from the presidency last month and calling a snap election. Many analysts believed that amid democratic backsliding in Serbia, Vucic would retain power. And there were widespread fears of fraud, intimidation, or even violence on Sunday. But instead, amid massive turnout, Vucic lost in an apparent landslide, setting off wild celebrations in Belgrade. “It is clear that we ⁠have lost these elections,” Vucic said in public remarks even as results were still being tallied. Vucic has attempted to tie his opponents to European and American leftists, claiming George Soros and western NGOs were funding his critics. But the Serbian opposition, though widely seen as more pro-Europe than Vucic, is not clearly leftist, or ideologically coherent. The student movement emerged from mass protests that began in November 2024 after the collapse of a concrete canopy at a train station that killed 15 people. Critics have blamed the disaster on alleged corruption by government officials that allowed shoddy work by contractors. This year, the student movement selected political novices, including academics, trade union officials, and artists as parliamentary candidates. The opposition slate avoided breaking with Vucic on Kosovo, which many Serbs still resent losing following NATO intervention in 1999, and did not adopt a detailed agenda. That was an part of a successful effort to make the election a referendum on Vucic and corruption in the country. The result is sign that voters around the world, as in the United States, are increasingly angry about corruption. That makes the Serbian election another bad sign for Donald Trump.