Isophoric News · Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Vucic concedes defeat in Serbia's snap parliamentary election as the student-led list is projected to win a majority
Aleksandar Vucic, leader of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), conceded defeat late Sunday, saying "it is clear that we have lost these elections," as the BBC quoted him, while noting that final results were not yet available. Vucic said a projection based on a sample gave the Student List, a movement that grew out of nearly two years of protests, between 135 and 140 of the 250 seats and his own list about 105, according to DW, France 24, Al Jazeera and Arab News (AP). Al Jazeera reported that 126 seats are needed for a majority. France 24 reported that a representative sample by the CESID-IPSPS pollsters showed 138 seats for the Student List and 104 for the SNS, and Arab News reported that Vucic said the SNS won about 1.7 million votes and the Student List about 2.2 million. The protests began after a train station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November 2024 and killed 16 people, according to Al Jazeera, and DW and Al Jazeera reported that Vucic and the SNS deny the corruption accusations that followed. Serbia's election commission put turnout at 64.9 percent at 6 p.m. local time, two hours before polls closed, according to the BBC and Al Jazeera; DW and France 24 gave nearly 70 percent as the final figure, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992. Al Jazeera reported that the monitoring group CRTA said its observers recorded pressure on voters or election workers at almost a third of the 500 polling stations it monitored, and that another monitor, CeSID, had received about 260 reports of potential irregularities by 5 p.m. In his concession Vucic blamed independent media and alleged interference by unnamed European countries and an "American deep state," according to DW and Arab News; the reports I read gave no evidence for those claims. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen congratulated the Student List, DW reported.