There are certainly different levels of oppression and autocracy.

Here it was designed and made to look like a democracy, but it really required a 70% turnout and 50%+ of people voting against the ruling party for them to accept defeat, especially as there are still large vote thefts going on (to the order of 5-10% of the entire voting population). Basically, anything less than 50% would have put the country in turmoil and violence — again.

As a tidbit, we've got 6.4M registered voters (18+) in a country of 6.5M people. There are a few explanations about how that works, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

> do you think, if there was real oppression people could even vote democratically and change their government?

Sorry, they get no bonus point for accepting the elections’ results. It’s the bare minimum if they want to pretend to be in a democracy. It does not make them any less oppressive. See also Orban and the PiS.

Now they have some time in the opposition to build something credible to get back into power if they really want it.

Definitely. As someone who's been living in Serbia for quite some time, I'd say Vučić's regime has been relatively mild. I haven't personally heard of people being jailed, killed, or even forced out of the country for political reasons. Turkey is much more repressive, while Russia, Belarus, and North Korea are in a completely different league.

"not downplaying how bad Vucic had been to Serbia".

But you are, though.

Oppression is not binary. And modern forms make it extremely difficult to hold the oppressive governments accountable.

There's a spectrum between the Netherlands and North Korea.

Would you also say for example, that there was no suppression in the GDR?

Fallacy of relative privation.

What is the point of this "no true Scotsman" comment, exactly? To defend Vucic? Or to say that what the people managed to do wasn't very hard because they managed to do it?

That is not a good analysis. Both North Korea and Russia claim to be democratic countries - see the name "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".

Bad take. These kind of hybrid regimes or "electoral autocracies" are kind of the flavor du jour of modern attempts towards authoritarian governments. You take control democratically, and then build a system where you control as much of the apparatus of democracy as possible: you change rules or laws to ensure opposition parties cannot gain an advantage in elections; you take control of or ally with the owners of media institutions to push your agenda; you concentrate powers under offices that are easy to control, such as an executive or judicial body. When these regimes topple, as with Orban earlier this year and Vucic now, it is because the autocrats overestimated their control. Orban didn't think it was possible for the usually fractious opposition to get the votes to defeat him, but Magyar managed it. Pressure from outside helps, too; when Orban took power, he did so as a center-right figure aligned with the largest political block in the EU (and got support from many of his counterparts, especially Merkel). By the time he lost power, much of Europe had distanced itself from Hungary and that pressure was being felt internally.

I think the important takeaway here is not that "a lack of violence means that there wasn't real oppression," but rather that modern autocrats are trying to execute a playbook whereby they retain the appearance of democracy to legitimize their rule as a mandate from the people while stacking the deck as much in their favor as possible. Indeed, trying to violently retain power kind of defeats the purpose of the charade; by relinquishing control, the autocrats can treat defeat as a temporary setback, not a permanent loss. Expect this playbook to evolve as more hybrid regimes fall out of favor.