Could the US have its own Serbia moment in Tuesday’s midterms?

The owner of a Detroit hair salon teases and curls her client’s hair, gesticulating with her comb as she answers the BBC’s questions. Is US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed too left-wing for Michigan, the journalist wants to know. “Anything but what we have,” the salon owner replies, adding with nervous laughter, “we’re on our way to hell. Socialist, socialise, social – don’t matter to me. Lower my cost of living!“

This clip resonated with many as it spread across social media ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. Americans are not alone in struggling with rising costs and unmet economic expectations. Since at least last spring, around the world, protest movements driven by affordability concerns have been popping up everywhere from Paris to Delhi to our own O’Connell Street. But something new and consequential appears to be happening in the US. Anger at the cost of living has fused with public concerns about corruption, with the two issues now seen, as many opinion columns across that country have put it, as “two sides of the same coin”.

“When a family reads a story about presidential crypto profits at the same time as they are deciding whether they should put off their expensive doctor’s appointment,” Jeremy Ney, a professor at Columbia Business School, told the Financial Times, “they see that the system is working for someone, just not for them”. NYU’s Daniel Weiner put it plainly in the same piece – “many Americans associate corruption and affordability as issues in their minds”.

The second Trump term has produced a steady drumbeat of stories of self-dealing. Mandated filings revealed that in the first year of this term, Trump earned more than $1 billion (€887 million) from his cryptocurrency businesses, which corruption experts have pointed out poses an obvious graft risk. Other revelations have concerned a luxury jet gifted by a foreign government, millions of dollars of donations for a presidential library and a palatial new ballroom, and legal pardons issued to billionaires. These details have become increasingly hard to swallow for ordinary Americans as petrol prices have soared 40 per cent in a year.

Stories of graft are impacting on public opinion. A recent CNBC poll found that corruption had become the top issue on voters’ minds ahead of the midterms, above grocery prices. Even a poll by Maga-friendly Fox News found that 88 per cent of respondents were concerned about government corruption, including supermajorities of both Republicans and Democrats.

You can find echoes of these sentiments in reporting from Serbia in the weeks leading up to its recent election. Reporters spoke to voters disdainful of the conspicuous wealth of allies of long-time autocratic leader Aleksandar Vucic, while ordinary people struggled. One source of this resentment was a construction project – a giant, neoclassical palace for the owner of the media company that backed and promoted Vucic.

Over the last two years, an opposition movement, which eventually became an electoral vehicle known as the “Student List”, has grown in Serbia. It was born from a scandal that saw 16 people die in a train station roof collapse blamed by protesters on a corrupt construction contract, and resulting street protests turned into a political force. Last weekend, the movement ran candidates in elections under the slogan “Serbia or the mafia”. Despite the odds and the electoral system being stacked against them, they won.

Political scientists warn that elections fought over corruption tend to bring to power both populists and insurgents with limited experience

With much of the world sliding towards illiberalism, a popular movement ousting a long-time strongman in Belgrade has been a welcome boost for liberal democracy. And Serbia is not a total outlier. Late last year, Nepal had its own so-called “Gen Z” protests over corruption and political patronage that went on to topple the government. An insurgent party then won the election that followed in a landslide.

There seems to be some momentum, then, for a trend of anti-corruption sentiment becoming a genuine force for political change. Could deep resentment against the Trump administration’s venality launch a similar wave that changes the composition of the US Houses of Congress on Tuesday?

There are of course huge caveats to this type of social change. One is that political scientists warn that elections fought over corruption tend to bring to power both populists and insurgents with limited experience. Another is that self-styled corruption fighters are held to a higher standard than the people they replace, so accusations of corruption can hit harder and alienate the swell of support that got them to power.

But in the particular case of the US in 2026, these factors might actually work in favour of those who oppose Trump. It may feel like a lifetime ago, but Trump rode to power by himself promising to “drain the swamp”, and the Maga movement was, in no small part, an anti-graft project. And Trump is losing that base. Half of those who voted for him for president in 2024 now say they are concerned about “corruption, self-dealing or conflicts of interest” in the Trump administration, according to an FT survey.

So perhaps America’s “Serbian” moment will not come this Tuesday, because it already came a decade ago, when Trump was the outsider promising to drain the swamp. Tuesday may simply be when the bill comes due.

Liz Carolan is a freelance writer specialising in technology and democracy