Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić concedes election defeat, blames Europe and U.S. ‘deep state’ and predicts Russia sanctions by spring

Serbia’s former president Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat in Sunday’s snap parliamentary election after preliminary projections showed the student-backed opposition winning a clear majority, while blaming unnamed European countries and what he called the U.S. “deep state” for helping bring down his political bloc.

“It is clear that we lost these elections,” Vučić said at his Serbian Progressive Party headquarters in Belgrade. He projected the Students’ List would take between 135 and 140 of parliament’s 250 seats, compared with about 105 for his United Serbia coalition.

Vučić described the result as the “verification of the revolution” carried out with direct support from several European countries and “the deep American state” opposed to President Donald Trump. He congratulated the winners but called them “executors” of what he described as a foreign-designed effort to bring an independent country to its knees.

“For a moment, you succeeded. For how long, we will see,” he said.

Vučić also predicted that Serbia’s next government would impose sanctions on Russia by March or April, although the Students’ List had previously said it did not plan to change Serbia’s longstanding refusal to join Western sanctions against Moscow.

He vowed that his political movement would continue fighting from opposition, saying the SNS remained united despite the defeat and would seek a return to power.

The election marked the biggest political reversal for Vučić and the SNS after more than a decade of dominance. The student-led movement grew out of protests triggered by the November 2024 collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad that killed 16 people and expanded into a broader campaign against corruption and authoritarianism.