They curried favor with President Trump and, following his lead, promoted conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and shadowy foreign forces working to oust them.
But when the time came, and the tide of voting went against them, the longtime leaders of Serbia and Hungary both stepped back from following the American president down the path of denying election defeat.
The quick acceptance of defeat in Serbia’s Oct. 25 general election by Aleksandar Vucic and, six months earlier, by Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, left Mr. Trump, who is still insisting that he won the 2020 presidential election, an outlier rather than a trendsetter in defying basic electoral arithmetic.
The concessions by even like-minded strongmen highlighted the gulf separating Mr. Trump’s denialism from the acceptance of reality. They also underlined yet again the question that looms over the most fiercely contested congressional races on Tuesday about whether the losers, from either party, will concede or challenge the balloting.
In Brazil’s recent presidential election, held on the same day as Serbia’s, Flávio Bolsonaro, the losing Trump-backed candidate, cried foul and demanded that the vote be annulled. But he fled to the United States instead of trying to mobilize his supporters to overturn the numbers, as his father, Jair, did after his own defeat in 2022 and Mr. Trump did two years earlier.
Other strongmen have taken a more Trumpian approach, like Nicolás Maduro, who was declared winner in a tainted election in 2024 and ruled Venezuela until United States forces plucked him from power this year.
So after years of running down democratic norms, the ready acceptance of defeat in Hungary and Serbia was not to be taken for granted. People close to the process said that the decisions were influenced, among other factors, by the fact that both leaders are angling for a return to power and that they lost so decisively that there was little room to manipulate the results.
Mr. Vucic, the master of a seemingly invincible political machine that dominated Serbia from 2012, carped on election night about “nonstop lying” by his foes and claimed that he had been “toppled” by foreign enemies, including “the American deep state — the one opposed to President Trump.”
Yet, to the surprise of both opponents and allies, Mr. Vucic prefaced his complaints with a simple statement: “It is clear that we have lost these elections.”
Christopher R. Hill, a veteran American diplomat who served as ambassador to Serbia under President Biden and assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush, said of Mr. Vucic’s swift concession speech: “There is no way he would have ‘pulled a Trump.’ No way at all.”
“He knew he lost and lost big and wanted to get out ahead of the process,” Mr. Hill said, noting that his victorious opponents in a newly formed political bloc called “Student List-Students Win” have such divergent views that they could have trouble hanging together. This, he said, encouraged Mr. Vucic to believe “I’ll be back.”
Mr. Orban, too, believed that he would be back, using his concession speech after an April 12 election to try to rally his shellshocked Fidesz party for future battles. “We are not giving up,” he said. “Never, never, never.”
“From our point of view, it is simple: We are democrats,” said Balazs Orban, Mr. Orban’s former political director and his party’s campaign manager for the April election it lost. “Our system only works if it has the support of the people. If we lose that support, even if there was election interference, our first task is to win it back,” he added.
Ana Brnabic, a close ally of Mr. Vucic’s serving as Serbia’s interim president, said that the election results “came as an enormous surprise. I accept them fully.” Many Serbs, she said, “will come to regret this choice” and vote differently in the future.
In contrast to the United States, where executive powers vested in the president give the White House wide leeway to declare its own reality, real power in Europe rests with Parliament and a prime minister named by the party with the most seats rather than a leader ensconced in office for a fixed term.
And European prime ministers, no matter how firm their grip at home on party machinery, the security forces, electoral commissions and other state institutions, are constrained in what they can say and do by foreign governments and foreign investors.
Hungary is a member of the European Union, which crimped Mr. Orban’s room for maneuver by tying tens of billions of euros in grants and loans to his acceptance of basic democratic norms. Serbia, though still outside the bloc and stalled in its halfhearted efforts to join, also depends heavily on E.U. funds and investment from Germany and other European countries.
“It is pretty obvious that the international pressure on Vucic was too high to resist,” said Milan Protic, an opposition-aligned historian and former mayor of Belgrade, the Serbian capital.
Still, he said, as the first results came in “it was pretty evident that Vucic and allies were ready to preserve power by using force.” Armed security forces and burly young men dressed in black and carrying baseball bats poured into the center of Belgrade on election night in support of Mr. Vucic.
But then, he added, “something happened that made him change his mind.”
Spasoje Vulevic, the former head of Serbia’s anti-terrorist unit, who was dismissed by Mr. Vucic last year, said in an interview that he was in touch with contacts in the security forces throughout the evening and feared violent resistance to a likely opposition victory.
Foreign pressure, particularly from the European Union, he said, “played an important role in Vucic’s decision not to resort to force and to concede defeat so quickly.”
Andreas Schieder, an Austrian member of the European Parliament who led the legislature’s election monitoring mission in Belgrade, said there had been a “completely weird atmosphere” around the central electoral commission in Belgrade in the early evening, with streetlights all turned off and “streets blocked by heavily armed policemen.”
Informer, a zealously pro-Vucic media group comprising print and television outlets, reported shortly after the polls closed that the governing party had won 54 percent of the vote, giving it a decisive victory. (In reality, it had won only 39 percent, far behind the Student List’s 52 percent.)
Mr. Schieder said “international pressure” helped persuade Mr. Vucic not to even think of following Mr. Trump’s example. “At the end it was too clear a result. He could not play with it,” the European legislator said. “If it had been more narrow, he could have tried something.”
Mr. Vucic, responding to media reports of foreign intervention to persuade him to accept the landslide against him, last week denied that he had spoken to any foreign officials until late on election night, long after he had conceded. His first caller, he said, was Mr. Orban, at 11:15 p.m.
Mr. Vucic said he had been encouraged by early results from villages showing his party “winning everywhere” but, after watching the tide turn as results came in from Belgrade and other cities, decided that it “made no sense” not to accept defeat.
“There was tension among the people, and everyone was nervous. It is the responsibility of serious people, of statesmen, to calm tensions in the country. It is their responsibility to come out and do what needs to be done,” he told a news conference two days after the vote.
For Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the main reason that Mr. Vucic and Mr. Orban bowed out of a fight was simple arithmetic.
“The margin was big and, unlike in the case of Trump, the enthusiasm of their support was limited,” he said. “They had been in power for a very long time and even their supporters wanted some change.”
“The other reason they did not act Trump,” he said, “is Trump. They knew that he is a guarantee for their personal security,” once out of power, much as he did by offering haven to Flávio Bolsonaro.
On Saturday, six days after his defeat, Mr. Vucic hosted Mr. Orban at his father’s house near Belgrade. “Yes, we both recently lost elections but we did not lose our dignity, our pride and our faith,” Mr. Vucic said, standing next to the defeated Hungarian leader.
“We’ll come back,” he added.
Alisa Dogramadzieva contributed reporting from Belgrade.
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