M ore than a decade ago, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told an interviewer in Belgrade that Serbia was “a country where the future happens first”. The phrase circulated widely on Serbian social media in the weeks before Sunday’s election, but in a way that could not have seemed possible 10 years ago. Who would then have imagined that Serbia today could be at the forefront of global democratic change?

The images from Belgrade on Sunday night – people dancing and crying in the streets, while in Novi Sad , the city that sparked the student movement , a flag bearing the image of the convicted war criminal Vojislav Šešelj, which had hung from a building since the 1990s, was torn down – reinforced the feeling that the future had truly arrived.

Watching my home country from abroad, I found it hard not to share in the excitement and emotion. I became involved with the student movement behind this electoral earthquake and was an election candidate for it, for about six months before moving abroad.…