How is popular support for Vucic in Serbia? Vucic only has a year left in his term. Will the next president be like minded? The anti-Vucic protests are still ongoing.
Support for Vučić has been gradually falling over the years. People are not mentally disciplined enough to stay loyal forever, and after 14 years of his rule, many are simply saturated with him.
They are also slowly forgetting how bad things were before him, under the traitorous, extremely liberal, weak governments of the early 2000s.
However, if Vučić still has a solid support base, it does not even need to be a majority or anything impressive.
He can still rule because of his control over informal networks, business circles, intelligence structures, security forces, public sector employment, electoral engineering, and similar systems.
Serbia is a hybrid autocracy, so raw popularity is not the only thing that matters. What he has at his disposal is much more direct and powerful than what Orban had.
Serbia still has many such authoritative power structures left over from the Milošević era of the 1990s, and unlike Hungary, it is not inside the EU. In my opinion, he still has that base alongside some decent popularity. He will not go down like Orban.
He has hardline loyalists firmly placed across the armed forces, the police, and the Constitutional Court, purging those not loyal enough during these protests.
He cannot use too much force and solve this problem once and for all by brutally suppressing the “students” and jailing the organizers, because of EU pressure.
But at the same time, they cannot really do anything to him except cause unrest from time to time.
He cannot be elected president for a third term by law, but he can install someone loyal to him.
There will probably be early presidential and parliamentary elections this year, in 2026, and Vučić will “win“ and become PM again (de jure, a more powerful function by design anyway).
Protests and riots might get worse for a while after the result, but that will not change the reality on the ground.
In my opinion, Vučić still has enough battery left to rule until 2030 at least.
By then, I predict the Western world will have declined even further and entered deeper internal collapse, so they may not have the energy to deal with him if he tries to centralize power even more.