After his defeat Vučić talks of "revolutionary terror" and brings up 2000 - when he himself was a minister under Milošević

Aleksandar Vučić, now cast as opposition leader, addressed the public a few days after the Student List won Serbia's snap parliamentary election. The tone was not that of a man preparing for a peaceful handover of power.

"Dear people, for three days now we have had real revolutionary terror being carried out," Vučić said. He then listed the raids: on a TV station, on the state water company Srbijavode, on a family patron saint's feast where, according to him, the priest wasn't allowed to read the prayer.

Then came the comparison: "Everything many people never dreamed would happen, we already lived through in 2000. Back then the worst came to power, now even worse than them have come."

Who remembers 2000

The comparison is interesting because of one small detail. In 2000, when Slobodan Milošević's regime fell, Vučić was information minister in his government. So for him, "the worst" are the people who toppled the regime he himself sat in.

Vučić accused the new winners of breaking every promise within three days. "They said: 'We want the return of institutions, the return of the state, faith in institutions.' They haven't preserved a single institution, they've started tearing down every one of them, outside the institutions," he said. This from the man whose party ran the country for more than a decade.

Bakić, the prosecutors and those pulling away

The sharpest part was aimed at sociologist Jovo Bakić, who, according to Vučić, put himself forward for interior minister and said Vučić should be arrested. The reply was pub-brawl level: "Let me tell you, you moron, it's better to be in prison than to sit next to you."

He also claims the new government sent four prosecutors, among them Nataša Krivokapić, to go through case files at the prosecutor's office, including the one on the "sound cannon". "There was no sound cannon, shame on you, you liars," Vučić said.

Perhaps the most honest sentence of the whole address was about his own people: "I watch how even those I worked with for 5, 10 and 15 years are slowly pulling away." In the Balkans, power isn't lost only at the ballot box, but also when the phone stops ringing.

Vučić ended with "Long live Serbia!" and a promise to oppose the new winners "as long as I breathe". Serbia now has a new government and a former strongman who has no intention of keeping quiet. If the raids he talks about are real, the new government is already handing him material for his terror story. If they aren't, we're watching a man who wants to write the script even from opposition.