Serbia’s Graduation Day

I was wrong. Until October 25, when Serbia’s students won an extraordinary victory in an early general election, I thought they had little chance of bringing down Aleksandar Vučić, their country’s authoritarian leader. For the last two years I had followed as the students created a leaderless movement and selected candidates for an electoral list to run against Vučić and his party in a vote that he had called. All this was interesting, I thought. But Serbia was constantly witnessing bouts of protest, and it seemed hard to imagine that such a broad-church movement—one that sought to unite conservative and religious nationalists, left-wing liberals, and everyone in between—could unseat a party that had the power to give pensioners a bonus payment just before an election, compel public-sector workers to cast ballots for it at the risk of losing their jobs, or pay people for images of their ballot slip with the right name circled.And yet the students won, not narrowly but by a crushing margin. After the Serbs toppled their wartime leader Slobodan Milošević, in October 2000, Georgians, Ukrainians, Egyptians, and others seeking to bring down their own dictators and autocrats studied the ...