The Spirit of Democracy Remains Strong

Persuasion | Francis Fukuyama

Serbia’s Student List defeated the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) in the parliamentary election on Sunday 25 October, and Aleksandar Vučić conceded, while María Corina Machado returned to Venezuela from exile the same day. Francis Fukuyama calls both developments hopeful but says it is too soon to judge whether either victory is sustainable.

The Student List grew from protests after a lethal roof collapse at a train station in Novi Sad in November 2024. The movement had no leaders and no evident hierarchy. Fukuyama expects that design to become a major liability in government, citing failed transitions in Ukraine in 2004 and Egypt in 2011. He wonders whether Vučić conceded quickly expecting the Student List to fail in office. In Venezuela, he says, Machado’s return puts the Rodríguez regime and the Trump administration in a difficult position. Lula’s defeat of Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil, he adds, may signal a major reversal of authoritarian-populist victories worldwide.

Comment

The Student List traded bargaining authority for protection: repression works by removing organisers, and the Novi Sad protests offered none to remove. Once the Student List holds a parliamentary majority, the bargain changes, since cabinet posts and budgets need identifiable decision-makers. The list never named a prospective prime minister, so disputes among its backers would lack an obvious arbiter. Fukuyama’s two precedents, Ukraine in 2004 and Egypt in 2011, point in different directions on hierarchy.

Ukraine’s Orange Revolution had named leaders, Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, and Yushchenko dismissed her government in 2005. Hierarchy did not keep the Orange coalition together, which weakens any reading of leaderlessness as the sole risk. In Egypt, the organised Muslim Brotherhood won the 2012 presidential election with Mohamed Morsi, and the army removed him in 2013. The harder test for the Student List may therefore be Vučić’s SNS, which put newspapers and television channels in friendly oligarchs’ hands.

Naming a prime minister would spend the Student List’s main asset, its refusal to present any single target. Delay would let the SNS present the pause as incapacity, the failure Fukuyama suspects Vučić anticipated when he conceded.

Strategic Question for Discussion

Which carries more weight for the Student List in government, the protection that leaderlessness gave against the SNS or the bargaining authority a named prime minister would bring, and what would tip the balance?

My assessment is that bargaining authority gains weight once cabinet posts and budgets pass to the Student List, since disputes among its backers would lack an arbiter. Protection still counts, because a named prime minister would give the SNS the single target the protests denied it. The balance would tip towards a named leader if the SNS loses the levers Fukuyama says it used against voters.

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