This time it’s different. Or so say the students who have been flooding the streets of Serbia for three months now. The protests were triggered by a horrific tragedy on 1 November, when a canopy collapsed at the recently renovated train station in Novi Sad, killing fifteen people. Blaming the accident on the notorious cronyism and graft in Serbia’s construction sector, the protesters have staged a series of confrontations with the authoritarian regime of President Aleksandar Vučić, whose Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has ruled since 2012. The protesters’ slogan is ‘corruption kills’; their symbol – now ubiquitous across the country – is a blood-red handprint.
Opponents of Vučić, a former ultranationalist turned right-wing populist who served as information minister in Milošević’s government, are used to heartbreak and disappointment. Over the past decade, protests have periodically assembled only to dissipate a few months later; Vučić could always count on the protesters to exhaust themselves. Yet the latest upsurge feels unique. For one, it shows no sign of slowing down, and it has been described as one of the largest student-led movements in Europe since May ’68. Last week, it triggered the resignation of Prime Minister Miloš Vučević: an act of desperation which indicated that Vučić is prepared to sacrifice his closest confidants in an effort to stem the discontent. The students’ demand is simple: they are calling on the government to release all documents related to the train station disaster. For them, what happened in Novi Sad is more than just an accident; it is emblematic of a power structure that has been cannibalized by corruption and criminality, and is now collapsing in on itself.
Under Vučić, the Serbian state has become a vast patronage system in which jobs, ministries and construction contracts are awarded to those with political connections. The ruling party functions as an employment programme for the servile and incompetent. While the protesters are not explicitly calling for regime change, their demands for accountability, if met, would see Vučić sent to jail. An end to impunity implies an end to his reign. The students have been careful to avoid association with Serbia’s official opposition, which is itself tainted by venality and easily smeared by pro-government media. Their aim is not simply to swap one patronage network for another. It is to transform the entire political culture. As one protest sign put it: ‘This is not a revolution but an exorcism.’
The state has responded with blunt force. On 22 November, when students at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts held a silent vigil for fifteen minutes – one for every life lost in the canopy collapse – they were attacked by a group of thugs in the employ of the municipal authorities. There followed a string of vehicle attacks on protesters, with cars repeatedly plowing into the crowds. In late January, protesters outside the SNS headquarters in Novi Sad were beaten with baseball bats. On each occasion, the repression has had a galvanizing effect. The reasons for this are partly generational. The Serbian youth does not have the war trauma of the older generations, nor the cynicism of millennials who came of age in the post-Milošević era, and for whom the word ‘democracy’ connotes disappointment and Western meddling.
The students’ anger has nonetheless radiated outwards from young people in urban centres. There have now been protests in well over 200 towns across the country. An astonishing 61% of Serbians now support the movement. When protesters mounted a 24-hour blockade of Belgrade late last month, they were joined by farmers on tractors – evoking the revolt which brought Milošević down a quarter of a century ago – and when they walked 80 kilometres from the capital of Belgrade to Novi Sad last week, they were greeted along the way by thousands of people offering them home-baked goods and tea. As the protesters slept outside in freezing temperatures, local residents furnished them with blankets, pillows and tents.
Vučić is clearly shaken. His public statements have oscillated between defiance – trying to characterize the discontent as yet another ‘colour revolution’ driven by foreign interference – and placation. He initially claimed that the canopy had nothing to do with the recent renovation, but photos say otherwise. His government then announced that it would increase higher education funding by 20% and release the documents in full, but is yet to make good on those promises. (Civil engineers are now demanding to see the construction diaries which would show who worked on the canopy day by day.) Across the former Yugoslavia, from Split to Sarajevo to Ljubljana, young people have turned out in protest to support their Serbian neighbours.
In previous decades, this kind of upheaval would have been encouraged by Western embassies and lavished with foreign aid. At the turn of the millennium, Washington trained Serbia’s opposition activists and helped to organize a parallel vote count in its disputed elections, knitting together the country’s fractured and ideologically diverse opposition at meetings in Budapest, as part of its regime-change programme. But now, in an age of rising geopolitical tension, world powers have an interest in upholding Vučić’s rule – seen as a guarantor of stability in a troubled region. Indeed, the strongman’s attempt to blame the crisis on foreign interference is ironic given the extent of his own reliance on external backing. He enjoys bipartisan support from Washington and is in favour with most European leaders, as well as Russia, China and the UAE. He has earned goodwill by supplying weapons to Ukraine and Israel, and Serbia’s vast lithium reserves have caught the eye of both the EU and the British-Australian multinational Rio Tinto, which is planning to open a new mine in the Jadar Valley despite public opposition.
Serbia has no organized and effective opposition capable of seizing control of the state. Its official parties are divided and unpopular, while the student movement has no electoral vehicle of its own. Vučić therefore believes that he will be able to solve the current crisis either by calling for elections or assembling a new government, but this will not placate the protesters. The SNS’s control of the media has long meant that its electoral success is more or less guaranteed, and recent votes have been marred by ballot-stuffing and allegations of fraud. Some of Vučić’s opponents are therefore calling for a transitional government to organize a free and fair contest. Yet as long as the president has the support of major foreign powers, he will have little incentive to agree.
Without such a peaceful pathway forward, it is likely that the protests will continue over the months ahead, perhaps descending into further violence. A more optimistic scenario, however, would see disgruntled segments of Serbian institutions like the judiciary, which has long been under SNS control, call for members of the current government to be brought to justice. Either way, everyone agrees that the discontent has reached a tipping point. The word on everyone’s lips is ‘there is no going back from this.’ Something fundamental has shifted, and though it is unlikely to translate into revolution in the weeks ahead, the end of the Vučić era no longer seems like a distant or abstract prospect. It finally feels inevitable.
Read on: Lily Lynch, ‘A New Serbia?’, NLR 140/141.
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