Time difference from Hungarians of parliamentary elections allows us to open perspectives that were not given enough space in the first waves of comments. The comparison of the Hungarian and Serbian "cases" was, of course, necessary and expected primarily due to the political, personal and business closeness of the two authoritarian leaders, Viktor Orbán and Aleksandar Vučić. After Orbán's convincing defeat, however, the entire network of relations changes, and if the winner of the Hungarian elections, Peter Magyar, is to be believed, the relations between the two countries will no longer rest on private and party interests, as before, but on an institutional arrangement. That change will, of course, be a heavy blow for the Serbian side because the SNS has thoroughly destroyed the country's institutions (so now there is no one to spread good neighborly relations based on respect for the law). It would also be unfair to leave out of this story the simple-hearted Union of Vojvodina Hungarians, always ready to find a Leader with lucrative privileges. But that's not what we're talking about here. More important is the analysis of the way in which the Hungarian opposition group, gathered around Peter Magyar, achieved victory, and can the Hungarian example be followed by opposition groups in Serbia?
ATTRACTING CONSERVATIVE VOTERS
It is difficult not to learn a lesson from the Hungarian parliamentary elections, and it seems that only the Serbian opposition fails to learn that lesson: against the ultimate evil, you go as a bloc, in the Serbian case with students, or you go into even deeper unfreedom. So much so that there is no place for any discussion about non-participation, columns and ideological sensitivities. The Hungarian opposition understood that. Will the Serbian one too - we'll see. It should be added that the recent local elections in ten constituencies in Serbia are a suggestive indicator of tendencies - SNS is losing support at a meteoric rate - but parliamentary elections are simply not the same as local elections. The story about the different electoral systems in Hungary and Serbia is completely irrelevant in this case and, one would say, serves nothing other than to distract the attention of opposition voters.
The second lesson is more complex and no less important: Peter Magjar and his political organization TISA are not political purists. The Hungarian is a renegade from Orbán's Fidesz, and whoever was in Fidesz even for a minute and a half - Hungarian's wife spent a little longer than a minute and a half as a minister in Orbán's government - cannot be clean. But that's the point: what kind of argument is purity in politics and what does it mean in politics? Let us only recall the first democratic president of the Spanish government, Adolfo Suárez González, who, as a promising cadre, sprung directly from Franco's fascist phalanx, or the French president François Mitterrand, who went from being a minister in the government of General Philippe Pétain (puppet French government during the Second World War) and a right-winger to becoming one of the greatest French presidents, the first to be elected from the ranks of the Socialist Party.
So, not only is he not "clean", but the Hungarian has remained on the right side of the political spectrum and in an ideological sense he is not too far from Orban. After all, the fact that he refused to say a single nice word about migrants, which, let's remind you, Orbán used as scarecrows in order to homogenize his electorate (damned people of color who take away our jobs, piss in parks, steal from shops and rape our women and girls), shows that the Hungarian treads very cautiously and very thoughtfully on the ground that causes scandal among left-leaning citizens.
In addition, his election campaign - under conditions, let's note, which are unimaginable for the Serbian political scene under Vučić - was populist: he kissed grandmothers, greeted uncles, tasted (Hungarian, of course) goulash, ran around Hungary (especially in small towns and villages), used every opportunity to be seen, and his strong political messages related above all to the treatment of cancer and what afflicts, literally, every citizen of Hungary (except members Fidessa): eradicating corruption and freeing the public (media) space, reminding us that Orbán collapsed the health system and a whole series of institutions.
Strong ideological tones, however, were almost absent, as well as an excessive focus on foreign policy, which the average voter is basically only interested in as a second- or third-rate matter. And that seems crucial when it comes to rhetoric. Because the Hungarian knows that the right-wing bacterium cannot be overcome in one election cycle, it cannot be dealt with without antibiotics that are given (or not given) precisely from the position of power and not in one term. Establishing and then maintaining a republic is the most difficult imaginable political task. In other words, the Hungarian did not want to irritate conservative voters with ideological entanglements. On the contrary, he even favored them by keeping silent about emigration. And it was a very deliberate move.
RIGHT SCENE ENGAGEMENT
In the past year and a half, the student torrent in Serbia has taken with it everything it has taken with it: it has uprooted trees, carried bloated carcasses of large livestock, eroded banks and rolled mud, flooded fertile land and searched for a way through regions it had not passed through until then, and it pulled both those on the left and those on the right, both silent and horned, both bald and hairy, and stars and crosses, and commissars and popes, and already the famous meeting held on June 28, 2025 at Slavia, when the sajkače were just sitting and the right-wing wingman Milo Lompar had something to say to the crowd, turned into an ambivalent symbol of the student rebellion.
Sensitive left-wing souls were paralyzed by shock, purists laughed at the place where they found themselves at that moment, slightly less sensitive supporters of the right-wing political spectrum remained somewhat confused, but overall, the gathering showed a political potential that can only be ignored due to a deep lack of knowledge (Serb. misunderstanding) of what it is to be political - gathering around a common goal or common idea. In this case, the goal and the idea are the same: the fight against the monstrous regime that, like a cancer, is destroying this country.
In other words, a regime that has accepted all kinds of political speech, so it has no problem being in a left-wing mood in the morning, liberal in the afternoon, and fascist in the afternoon and evening (which is its essence), cannot be defeated if the opponent writes off the right or conservative side of the political spectrum. After all, after the mass murder in "Ribnikar" on May 3, 2023, Vučić tried very hard to put under firm control the right-wing scene that could be sensitive to such an event. In that sense, the extreme right has always naturally belonged to him (it will bring a tear to his eye, Teofil Pančić would say).
The history of the Serbian multi-party system, however, gives very clear guidelines as to how a player on the political scene must position himself in order to be effective: whether he is a leftist or a liberal, he must not ignore right-wing sentiments that have been, if not dominant for 36 years, at least as alive as the others. (Feeling and experience tell us that they are dominant, but serious research would still have to confirm this, unless the best proof is precisely the rule of the SNS.) After all, if Vojislav Koštunica had not gone to the right and thus freed up the space that had just been conquered by the retrained radicals, with lies and false promises, Serbia would not today be in a group of its own excreta.
To that extent, the student movement effortlessly incorporated what a left-liberal, like the signatories of these lines, is neither comfortable to see nor hear: shacks as a symbol of conservatism, Chetnik boots as an expression of non-acceptance of reality and ethical relativization, right-wing discourse as irrational speech, nationalist and chauvinist slogans, pops, icons and crusaders as an expression of religious stupor... But all of this is on the right side of the spectrum, and a good, perhaps crucial part of that scene, it is clearly against Vučić's regime. We may not like the reasons offered by right-wingers at all, but if we don't like something, it's still our problem.
In other words, politics is not for the squeamish (Machiavelli noticed this, and he knew what he was talking about), and Vučić is falling only with votes from the right. The Hungarian, therefore, included the right-wing rhetoric in his campaign against Orban and, with the opposition for which public interest was more important than personal and party interests, overthrew him. Which way will the Hungarian ship tilt in "peacetime conditions" - we will see. For now, he did what was necessary.
AMORPHOUSNESS
In comparing the Hungarian and Serbian cases, there are more differences than similarities, so one of the differences that commentators insist on and which, at least at first glance, seems important, is precisely that the Hungarian is a charismatic leader, while TISA has proven to be a well-organized group that knows what it's doing.
On the other hand, in Serbia, there is no single and strong political organization, and even less a charismatic leader behind which the opposition scene would gather. However, these differences are significant to the extent that the two political spaces are, by the nature of things, different. Because our entire experience and everything we know about politics leans towards the Hungarian model: a leader plus a good organization. Except that logic does not apply to the Serbian case.
The student movement destroyed Vučić's monolith precisely because it bypassed established political logic: it attacked Vučić with anti-politics (we are not interested in you, we are interested in the institutions) and lost ground to him, and when it introduced a political moment - a demand for elections - it again resorted to unconventional amorphousness: neither a leader nor a solid organization. There is no doubt that this and such a strategy bore fruit because, as we can see, the Vučić regime is failing to consolidate. And here we again reach the right side of the political spectrum: not only does this vagueness constitutive of the student movement encourage the right side, but the essential amorphousness of the regime (anything is possible) is answered by an elastic, also amorphous voting body.
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