In seven months, voters in five countries have dealt significant electoral setbacks to authoritarian hard-right leaders. They offer a series of surprises that few analysts anticipated. In April, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán lost power after 16 years. On October 25, Brazil’s Lula defeated Flávio Bolsonaro in a presidential runoff, while Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat to a student-led movement on the same day. Two days later, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu lost his parliamentary majority. And on November 3, Americans stripped Donald Trump’s Republican Party of control of both houses of Congress. These developments surely constitute a significant pattern. They suggest that the world has been granted a reprieve from some of the worst political possibilities these leaders represented. However, they do not mean that the forces sustaining them have been defeated or that democracy has been redeemed.What actually happenedThe five cases are not identical, and the scale of defeat varies considerably.In the United States, Democrats gained seven Senate seats and around thirty House seats, taking control of both chambers of Congress. Trump’s approval rating had fallen to 33%, with 89% of voters identifying the cost of living as a major concern. Trump has two more years left in his presidency and no further election to face. He has two months before the newly elected Congress is sworn in in January 2027 after which he must contend with a hostile legislature. Given his proclivities, those two months may be enough for him to unleash considerable mischief particularly in foreign affairs. In Brazil, Lula secured 51.8% of the vote against 48.2% for Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Lula’s victory was particularly significant because Flávio had led the first round. Yet the defeat of Bolsonarismo at the presidential ballot has scarcely weakened its wider political and social foundations. Lula confronts an even more conservative Congress dominated by the right and transactional Centrão bloc, alongside powerful agribusiness and financial interests to structural reforms. Mounting public debt, high interest rates and fiscal constraints further restrict his capacity for redistribution and public investment. His victory may arrest the advance of the far right without fundamentally altering the conditions that nourish it. In Israel, Netanyahu’s bloc secured 53 seats, his Likud remaining the largest party. The opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot, got 48 seats while Arab parties won 19. As I write, the opposition has managed to get the backing of 67 lawmakers to form a new government. Even this new government is not going to produce a fundamental shift in Israel’s policies. The opposition itself remains broadly committed to the existing security paradigm, the occupation of Palestinian territories and the expansion of settlements. The political influence of the right-wing and religious parties extends well beyond Netanyahu personally. The electoral setback thus will alter the political leadership without challenging the ideological and institutional foundations of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians.In contrast, Serbia and Hungary represent the clearest transfers of political power. In Serbia, the Student List won 140 of the 250 parliamentary seats, against 103 for Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party. The movement emerged from nearly two years of student-led protests following the Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse, which killed 16 people and became a symbol of corruption and governmental negligence. Its deliberately decentralised, leaderless character and the willingness of established opposition forces to make room for a broader movement were important features of the campaign. Vučić conceded defeat, although the outgoing ruling party continues to control the state apparatus until the transfer of power is completed. In Hungary, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won 141 of the 199 parliamentary seats, securing more than 70% of the legislature and ending Orbán’s 16-year rule. Turnout approached 80%. This was particularly consequential because Orbán had spent years reshaping electoral institutions, media ownership and the political playing field to consolidate Fidesz’s dominance. Yet the scale of Tisza’s victory overcame these structural advantages. Orbán conceded defeat. What the defeats have in commonThese defeats did not mean the victory for liberal democracy or any ideological awakening. First, voters were mobilised principally by accumulated grievances: inflation and the cost of living, corruption, institutional decay, unemployment and the failure of public services. The Novi Sad disaster became a focal point for Serbian anger; economic anxieties weighed heavily in the American election; and corruption, health care and the deterioration of public institutions figured prominently in Hungary. The lesson is that material grievances can become the point of convergence for otherwise disparate political discontents. Ideological opposition becomes electorally effective when it connects with the lived experiences of ordinary people.Second, youth mobilisation was a significant catalyst, most dramatically in Serbia, where a decentralised student movement became the vehicle for a wider social revolt. The Student List had no conventional party hierarchy or established political leadership. Its candidates came from diverse professional and social backgrounds, while the movement’s collective decision-making helped it avoid becoming the personal property of a political leader. The willingness of established opposition forces to make room for this initiative was equally important. Rather than insisting on controlling the movement, they recognised that their own credibility had been exhausted and that a new political vehicle offered a better prospect of defeating the incumbent. This is perhaps the most instructive feature of the Serbian experience for opposition politics elsewhere. Third, electoral institutions, despite tinkering, retained sufficient space for political competition to produce an outcome contrary to the incumbent’s interests. Orbán had reshaped Hungary’s electoral system, entrenched government influence over much of the media and redrawn constituencies to favour Fidesz. Yet a sufficiently broad electoral mobilisation overcame these advantages. In Serbia, too, the Student List prevailed despite serious concerns about the fairness of the political environment. These elections have shown that institutional manipulation, however extensive, cannot prevent electoral defeats of authoritarian incumbency. The ballot box can still become an instrument of resistance, provided the opposition can mobilise sufficiently broad support and the electoral process retains some capacity to register it.What has not changedAs explained above, it would be premature to interpret these results as the beginning of a new democratic order. The political character of the victors themselves demands caution.Magyar is a former Orbán associate whose political programme does not represent a decisive break with the ideological right. His immediate promise is primarily to restore institutional accountability and address corruption, not to undertake a radical transformation of Hungarian society. The Serbian Student List must now demonstrate that a decentralised movement without governing experience can translate its moral authority into a coherent programme and functioning government. Lula, at 80, returns to office in a deeply polarised country where Bolsonarismo retains substantial political influence and institutional strength. The American Democrats won on widespread economic discontent, may not display alternative political vision. Even Bernie Sanders has acknowledged the Democratic Party’s continuing crisis of popular credibility.Israel is an especially revealing case. The Eisenkot-led opposition has not established a political consensus for a just settlement with the Palestinians. The voters who weakened Netanyahu’s position may have been motivated more by exhaustion with war and dissatisfaction with his leadership than by opposition to the policies pursued in Gaza and the West Bank. A change in the parliamentary arithmetic does not mean a change in the underlying political consensus.Nor has the architecture of global power changed. The same corporations, financial markets, arms industries and geopolitical rivalries remain in place. Electoral victories can dislodge particular political leaders without dismantling the economic and institutional arrangements that sustain authoritarian politics. The defeat of a political figure is not necessarily the defeat of the political and economic forces that produced him. India: The hope and the weightAgainst this international backdrop, the protests against the Modi regime in India have rekindled hope for political change. A series of serendipitous developments has helped bring accumulated public discontent to the surface. Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s contemptuous reference to unemployed youth as ‘cockroaches’ was turned on its head and used to mobilise them under the banner of the ‘Cockroach Janata Party’. The paper leak controversy provided a rallying point, channeling their accumulated anger into a movement demanding the resignation of Union education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. Its success has rekindled popular hopes of change and galvanised opposition parties into coming together. The CJP subsequently took up another burning issue: the conduct of the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, accused of disenfranchising crores of voters through electoral roll revision to benefit the ruling party. Countrywide protests have followed, braving brazen repression, demanding his resignation. They still continue. Opposition parties marched together at Ramlila Maidan on November 1, giving institutional expression to a discontent that had initially emerged outside established party politics.The mood is encouraging. But the analogy with Hungary, Serbia, Brazil and the United States must be approached with considerable caution. India differs from these societies in ways that make the challenge of political change more formidable.Scale and diversityHungary has a population of about ten million and a relatively compact political geography. Serbia’s movement emerged from university centres before spreading nationally. India has 1.4 billion people, hundreds of languages, enormous regional variations and a federal political structure. A movement that can generate a common political mobilisation in Delhi may have a very different resonance in Kerala, Bihar or the Northeast. Building a nationwide movement across these differences requires more than the circulation of a common slogan or the convergence of episodic protests. It requires sustained political organisation and a programme capable of addressing diverse social and regional interests.The nature of the adversaryOrbán, Vučić and Trump preside over political formations strongly identified with their personal leadership. India’s political configuration is more complex. The Modi regime rests not merely on the electoral strength of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the personality of Narendra Modi, but on the organisational and ideological infrastructure of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, built over a century through a network of affiliated organisations, educational institutions, unions, cultural bodies and neighbourhood-level activities. The relationship between the RSS and BJP combines an extra-electoral ideological apparatus with an electoral-political instrument. The former shapes the ideological terrain; the latter converts that influence into governmental power. Consequently, defeating the BJP electorally, formidable though, does not automatically dismantle the social and ideological networks that sustain Hindutva. The BJP lost its parliamentary majority in 2024 but remained in government through its allies. This illustrates the resilience of a political formation whose power extends beyond electoral arithmetic.The integrity of the electoral processThis is perhaps the most consequential difference. The Hungarian and Serbian experiences demonstrate that even heavily distorted electoral environments can retain openings for political change. In India, however, serious questions have arisen about the independence and functioning of the Election Commission. The 2023 legislation effectively places the appointment of Election Commissioners under the Union government’s control, raising serious questions about their independence. Kumar’s conduct has further intensified these apprehensions. After all, however people vote, it is the EC that oversees the counting and ultimately declares the result. A partisan EC therefore poses a serious institutional challenge to the credibility of electoral democracy. The Supreme Court, which could act as a check on the EC’s actions, has so far proved ineffective, as in several previous instances, where it has appeared reluctant to challenge the Executive. Numerous petitions are currently pending before it but there is little indication that the court will, on its own initiative, address the issue at its institutional roots. The opposition itselfSerbia’s established opposition parties made room for a movement that had acquired greater public credibility than they possessed. India’s opposition has struggled to demonstrate a comparable willingness to subordinate partisan interests to a larger political objective. The parties that came together at Ramlila Maidan have repeatedly contested against one another and continue to harbour competing electoral ambitions. Some are only a few state elections away from abandoning their broader alliance. The Congress remains the largest national opposition party, but it has yet to demonstrate consistently that it can act as the catalyst for a durable coalition rather than merely claim leadership of one. A fragmented political class may be capable of sharing a protest platform without being capable of sustaining a common political alternative. The danger is of winning the street but losing the election. It is the opposition’s political ineptitude that has provided the BJP with the conditions for its sustained political dominance.The social and ideological basePerhaps the most difficult challenge is the depth of Hindutva’s social penetration. Its appeal is not reducible to the popularity of Modi or the BJP. It has cultivated a majoritarian conception of national identity over decades, drawing upon religious sentiment, cultural symbols, historical narratives and networks of everyday social influence. Anger over inflation, unemployment and examination scandals can weaken electoral support, just as material grievances contributed to the defeat of Orbán. But the Indian opposition cannot rely on discontent alone. It lacks a sufficiently developed alternative conception of national belonging that can unite people across caste, religious, linguistic and regional divisions. A wave of protest can force a minister to resign; it cannot, by itself, displace an entrenched political imagination.What the lesson isThree conclusions follow, none of them particularly comfortable.First, movements must acquire an effective political and electoral vehicle. The Serbian Student List succeeded because a broad-based movement translated its mobilisation into an electoral formation, while established parties allowed it the space to do so. India’s youth mobilisation will also need a means of converting protest into sustained political intervention. Established opposition parties must recognise that the credibility of a movement may depend precisely on its autonomy from their established hierarchies and ambitions. This does not necessarily mean abandoning party politics, but it does mean rethinking its relationship with popular movements.Second, the integrity of the electoral process must be restored before electoral victory can be pursued. It is not the SIR alone; the election process must be radically revamped bringing back paper ballots, at least in the short run instituting a full VVPAT audit wherever necessary, and ensuring the constitutional right of all people living in India to vote. To restore confidence of people in the electoral process, there may be re-elections in all the states where they were conducted by the present EC. Third, electoral victory is only the beginning of democratic reconstruction. Magyar will be judged by whether he can restore institutional independence after Orbán’s long tenure. Lula must govern against an entrenched right that remains socially and politically powerful. The American Democrats must demonstrate that their victory represents more than a temporary rejection of Trump. Serbia’s new political leadership must prove that the moral energy of its movement can be translated into an accountable government. Any change of government in India would inherit institutions that have undergone significant political transformation and a society deeply polarised by majoritarian politics. Reversing this condition will require more than restoring administrative procedures. It will require rebuilding democratic institutions, social solidarity and a political imagination founded on equal citizenship.The ballot box has bitten back in several countries within a remarkably short period. That is an encouraging development, but a reprieve is not redemption. The defeats of these leaders demonstrate that authoritarian political projects are not invulnerable and that organised popular discontent can still alter the political balance. For India, securing even a reprieve remains the immediate challenge; redemption is a far more distant prospect. The existing political and institutional framework offers little hope for a genuinely pro-people reconstruction, regardless of which party comes to power. For now, however, that remains a secondary question.Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO of Petronet and professor at IIT Kharagpur and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.