All photographs courtesy of Lily Lynch.

October 25, 2026

6:30 A.M. 

On election day, all normal time stopped. From early in the morning, friends sent me footage of lines snaking around buildings, through parks, down city blocks. A friend back in California sent me photos of a party at a café near the Serbian consulate in Los Angeles, with music, dancing, barbecue. A few weeks earlier, the Serbian Republic Electoral Commission had announced that the country’s large diaspora would be allowed to vote only during Serbia’s domestic polling hours. This meant that Serbian voters in other countries and time zones would have to travel to their embassy or consulate at odd hours or in the middle of the night to cast their ballots. The last-minute rule change was widely interpreted as an attempt by the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) to undercut its insurgent rival, Student List (SL). The Serbian diaspora was known to favor the opposition.

One friend wanted to make a bet: “The turnout is going to be record-breaking,” he wrote. “And SL will win by a landslide.” I was cautiously optimistic, but not a true believer. Though not Serbian myself, I’d been reporting on the nation for more than a decade; I’ve covered countless Serbian elections over the past fourteen years and was in Serbia for the SNS’s ascent to power in 2012. The party’s leader, Aleksandar Vučić, also the country’s erstwhile president and premier, had always managed to outsmart us. Without fail, he had either won outright or massaged the vote to his liking when he hadn’t: a little ballot-stuffing here, a little Gogolian resurrection of dead voters there, along with some voter intimidation and paying the poor and marginalized for their votes. Why should this time be any different?

If anything, this time would be worse, perhaps far worse. Vučić finally had a real competitor in SL, a new outfit that had emerged out of two years of student protests, and which, according to at least some polls, enjoyed more popular support than SNS. None of the names on SL’s slate were those of students, but nor were they professional politicians. All of them—professors, doctors, actors, engineers, athletes—had been selected via plenum. The group therefore represented an entirely novel approach to national politics. If it managed to pull off a win, an age-old status quo would come to an end.

I had barely slept. In the run-up to election day, pro-Vučić media outlets said that violence or even civil war would break out. Many were expecting at least some bloodshed. A worried friend bought me a neon-yellow high-vis reflector vest that he hoped would identify me as press, though I was later reminded that this could just as easily make me a target. There were other foreboding signs going into the day: a Red Star Belgrade football match was scheduled for four that afternoon, meaning that the cantankerous and marauding sports fans and for-hire brutes known as Delije, with whom Vučić had close ties, would be out on the streets. An eleventh-hour change to legal procedures at the Belgrade Higher Court seemed to portend mass arrests.

I dressed, trying to recall the last time I’d had anything to eat. It had been the previous afternoon. I still had no appetite.

8 A.M.

I decided to walk thirty minutes to meet my friend Sonja at her polling station in Dorćol, the city’s oldest neighborhood. In Belgrade, the previous day had been immaculate: autumnal, sunny, and crisp. Now it was gray.

There were more people out on the streets than usual, but not by much. When I walked past the nearest polling station and saw just a few people out front, my faith wavered. Perhaps all the jubilant reports I’d received from friends of long lines were nothing more than their wishful thinking, people only seeing what they wanted to see. Most likely, this time would be just like all the rest. It was foolish to have gotten my hopes up.

I made my way down to Slavija, a large traffic roundabout surrounding a public fountain. A jumbo campaign ad of Vučić stared down at me from the facade of a tall building. The ubiquity of his face—on buildings, on the cover of every lurid tabloid, on state television—seemed almost cartoonishly authoritarian.

As I approached Novi Dvor, the president’s office, I saw that the police had erected barricades, preventing passage by foot or car. A smattering of officers was milling around. Mustering my most confident Serbian, I asked one if I could pass through. “I live a few blocks up,” I told him, “off of Terazije.” Wordlessly, with an air of exhaustion, he made make an opening in the barriers and waved me along. I allowed myself to wonder whether state power would fold with so little resistance later that night.

9 A.M.

Sonja met me in front of her polling station, the commerce school on Hilandarska Street. Inside, there was a flurry of activity but, dishearteningly, no voting queue.

After Sonja cast her vote, we walked to Palilula Market, where we had heard there was going to be an informal election party. Despite the hour, some around us were drinking shots of rakija, a popular kind of brandy. My phone lit up with notifications detailing a record early-voter turnout. By nine, the numbers were twice those of the previous election, in 2023. We considered whether the showing could somehow be explained by the end of daylight savings at three that same morning.

11 A.M.

I took one of the city’s antiquated red trams down Bulevar kralja Aleksandra to Zvezdara, a neighborhood just south of downtown Belgrade, where I met a mobile election-monitoring team for SL. To guard against electoral subterfuge, SL had dispatched them to the general vicinity of specific polling sites. They were trained to identify expected forms of interference, from garden-variety intimidation to the so-called Bulgarian Train, a method of rigging votes. By the time I arrived, they had just diffused a tense situation with a local SNS-backed thug.

Unaccountably, the mobile team’s spirits seemed high, as though the incident had hardly bothered them. I received a text saying that by noon, turnout was 34.4%.

1:30 P.M.

The mobile team dropped me off on Bulevar kralja Aleksandra, and I decided to walk its length back toward downtown. At some point, my appetite returned, so I stopped off at an Italian restaurant that I had patronized countless times in my more than fifteen years of coming to Serbia. Unsure what to do after lunch, I returned to my apartment. The long wait for the initial results was unbearable, so I thought I’d try to sleep through part of it.

3 P.M.

I couldn’t sleep. My mood had turned, the cautious optimism of the morning fading to let dread creep back in. The high turnout of the morning had leveled off, one friend wrote. It was still much higher than in elections past, but would it be enough? For SL to win, it would need greater voter participation than this. A friend texted to reassure me: “Things were just slowing down for lunch, which is as expected. Just wait.”

4 P.M.

I walked to the headquarters of the Center for Research, Transparency, and Accountability (CRTA), an election watchdog, to attend a press conference. Raša Nedeljkov, the center’s director, told us that the morning turnout was indeed historic. But by afternoon, he confirmed, things had petered out somewhat. He read off a litany of irregularities: there were widespread problems with the ultraviolet lamps and ultraviolet spray used to guard against repeat voting, and at least two locations, election observers had been attacked. After the press conference, I paced around the office, drinking perhaps too much instant coffee.

6 P.M.

I left CRTA shortly after dark. I wanted to see what was happening at Pionirski Park, which sits adjacent to the Republic Electoral Commission. What I saw there made my stomach turn: riot police in full gear were amassing in the park, already pitch black with the streetlights turned off. This, I thought, was the clearest signal yet that Vučić planned to declare victory no matter the polling figures—and that he was prepared to use force.

7:30 P.M.

With a sense of restlessness, I returned to CRTA, where I accepted the offer of a British journalist from the Times to accompany him and his fixer to the SL headquarters. For security reasons, or so the story went, SL was based all the way out in New Belgrade, on the opposite side of the Sava River. New Belgrade was built entirely after the Second World War, a showcase of Yugoslav socialist brutalism. The SL base of operations was located somewhere amid its imposing concrete blocks.

As we left CRTA in a taxi, we saw a large group of men in black walking toward Pionirski Park. “Those don’t look like students,” the Times journalist offered. There was no mistaking who they were. These were thugs in the employ of the state authorities, their henchmen for carrying out dirty work. Our car sped away before we saw exactly what their business was, but it was almost certainly something violent.

In New Belgrade, the SL offices were in a state of pandemonium. Journalists from all over the world had descended on the scene, jostling for an electrical outlet for their equipment or just a place to sit. People were piled on top of one another. It seemed we had all had the same idea. It wouldn’t be long—just thirty minutes—before the polls closed; the first batch of results would come in just a little after that. I doubted whether it was worthwhile to wait things out from SL, where the frenzy and commotion were distracting. And I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to ring in the victory, no matter whose it would be, among so many members of the media.

8:46 P.M.

Back at my apartment, I got a word from a well-connected contact, who informed me that the U.S. embassy had congratulated SL on its victory in the parliamentary elections. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it; there were no major sources claiming triumph for SL, and it seemed unwise to place much too stock in one informant. Better to be agnostic about the results until the polls were in.

9:23 P.M.

I received another message from the same source: the U.S. embassy had reportedly congratulated SL’s representatives, but had told them to hold off on announcing victory until Vučić held his own press conference. That press conference, said my source, would begin in the next five minutes.

Meanwhile, pro-Vučić television stations began announcing their preliminary election “results,” projecting that SNS would win by a landslide, securing 54.21% of the vote to Student List’s 36.85%.

9:30 P.M.

I heard hollers from outside, coming from many voices all at once. Seconds later, I received a message from a friend: Vučić had conceded defeat.

Instinctively, I tore my door open and ran outside. Everyone else had apparently done the same. I saw a group of women sobbing in the street; when they caught sight of me, they came over to fold me into their embrace. For years, Western diplomats had justified their support for Vučić by saying that Serbs love a strongman, as though it were a recognized aspect of the national character. Now, as if to contradict the old brocard, the country had elected a leaderless movement to power.

I ambled down to Slavija Square, where people were just starting to gather. We walked into traffic. Drivers left their cars in the street to join the celebration. Young men set off a deafening round of fireworks. My ears ringing, I bumped into a teenager with a shaved head. Instead of apologizing and moving on, we hugged and jumped up and down, screaming. One of Belgrade’s red trams had been stopped in its tracks and was now being taken over by the people, who hung out of its windows screaming pobeda!—“victory!”

Everyone I met kept repeating the length of Vučić’s reign—“fourteen years!”—in disbelief. I thought about all that had transpired in that time: the relationships that had ended, the people who had died, the activists whose idealism had collapsed into cynicism and despair, the many people who had left the country, vowing never to return.

I stumbled around for an hour or two—time had long since stopped making sense—and decided to go back to my apartment. I still had to report on these developments, produce an account of things that would keep me tethered to the outside world.

When I got home, I read the messages in my email inbox. My friend Tara had written, “Honestly, genuinely, in the back of my mind I think Vučić is pulling a fast one on us somehow.” Every third person I talked to expressed similar misgivings: that somehow, he wasn’t really finished, that he would find a way to sabotage the moment and seize power again, that it was all an elaborate Machiavellian stunt, that it wasn’t really over. I could understand why. For those who’d lived with his omnipresence for so long, it was hard to believe that he was gone.

Lily Lynch is a foreign-affairs writer and the co-founder and editor-in-chief of  Balkanist Magazine.