The revolution in Serbia seems unstoppable. People have lost their fear of the political system. As the mass protests against corruption and authoritarian rule have reached their climax on Saturday, the system around once almighty President Aleksandar Vučić appears clueless how to regain control. An analysis.
Aleksandrovac near Negotin in Southern Serbia isn’t what you would call the center of the world. The town of not even 6.000 inhabitants briefly took center stage yesterday in the unfolding revolution in Serbia – at least for observers with a keen eye.
After Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić had visited the place, announcing investments and infrastructure projects, dozens spontaneously took to the streets on Saturday evening, jeering, whistling, protesting against the political system he and his party SNS have created in Serbia in the past 13 years.
Small towns like that usually are not hotbeds of anti government protests.
Before Vučić’s visit and the protests following it, most people even with a great interest in the Balkans, had never heard of the place, myself included.
It wasn’t the only small town in the country where people have taken to the streets to demand democracy, the rule of law and decisive action against widespread corruption.
Hundreds of Thousands Took to the Streets on Saturday
Half the country seemed to be on the streets on Saturday. Students, who have led the mass protests for the past two months, blocked three crucial bridges across the Danube in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest town in the northern province of Vojvodina.
Tens of thousands of people from Novi Sad and many other places in Serbia had gathered in streets in the city center to support the students. Protesters claim that at its climax more than a 100.000 people participated in that rally alone, making it the biggest in Serbian history.
Drone footage and photos seem to support that estimate.
This time, even army veterans from the 63rd Airborne Brigade joined in the protests. The brigade is considered one of two elite units of the Serbian Armed Forces.
Several dozen pot bellied former soldiers, most in uniform, laid down flowers in front of the train station in Novi Sad. The collapse of the station’s canopy killed 15 people on November 1st last year. It was this tragic accident that sparked the mass protests that followed soon and have blossomed into nothing short of a revolution a few weeks ago.
A spokesman of the 63rd’s Airborne veterans‘ association read out a statement, pledging the veteran’s support for the students‘ demands.
Like the inhabitants of small towns, veterans of elite units aren’t generally known to be firebrand revolutionaries.
SNS Is Having a Meltdown
Media all over the country covered the event widely – with the exception of the private network Pink. Together with the infamous tabloid Informer it seems to be the last bastion of what just recently was a media empire more or less under the control of Serbia’s ruling party SNS and President Vučić and associates.
The state owned public broadcaster RTS opened its main newscast with a five minute long live coverage from the protests in Novi Sad. Vučićs visit to Aleksandrovac came much later and didn’t get as much airtime.
SNS functionaries fumed.
On its homepage, the party published a statement calling RTS’s coverage „scandalous“, and a „violation of all rules of objective and impartial journalism“ – without going into detail just how the broadcaster had violated these rules.
„Those who should represent the public service of Serbia are the most impolite“, the statement went on, „and take the side of politicians who want to undermine Serbia’s constitutional order, they ignore all rules of journalism and grossly abuse their profession as journalists“.
The statement concluded with an ominous announcement.
„We are informing citizens that we will initiate all necessary measures and will do everything to protect the institutions of Serbia, prevent the further humiliation of Serbia and the misleading of the Serbian public in a hitherto unprecedented way“.
Mixed Messages
Ever since then, SNS’s top representatives have been sending mixed messages, to say the least.
Acting Prime Minister and party chairman Miloš Vučеvić warned that the protests could lead to the dissolution of the country and invoked memories of the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia. He also called the number of participants of the ongoing rally in Novi Sad exaggerated. All of Novi Sad was not big enough to hold 100.000 protesters, he said.
Just a week ago, SNS had held a counter protest in the small central Serbian town of Jagodina. According to most observers, roughly 14.000 people attended it, some allow for 40.000. Hardcore SNS sympathizers insist that it was at least 100.000. Novi Sad is several times the size of Jagodina.
The irony seems to have escaped Vučеvić.
Vučеvić, once handpicked by Vučić himself, had to resign as prime minister earlier this week, prompting the resignation of the entire cabinet. (Read more about it here.) He will remain acting PM until a successor has been nominated by Vučić and confirmed by the National Assembly. This can either happen within the next three and a half weeks, or Vučić has to call snap elections.
The President of the National Assembly, Ana Brnabić, flatout denied that there was a political crisis in Serbia in an interview she gave the SNS loyal broadcaster Pink. Rather, this was a crisis of the opposition, she said, urging the students to return to their universities and to enter a dialogue with the government.
President Vučić seems to have embarked on a kind of „meet the voters“ tour. As the public broadcaster RTS reports, after his speech in Aleksandrovac he brought the employees of a local waste disposal service pljeskavice (local burgers) and soft drinks. Interestingly, it doesn’t say in which town the visit took place.
On Sunday, he reiterated that in the upcoming weeks he would not nominate a tranisitional or expert government. If necessary, he would call new elections, Vučić stressed in his weekly Sunday speech on his Instagram channel, hardly aknowledging that mass protests that have spread to small towns in rural Serbia such as Aleksandrovac or Velika Plana in Central Serbia.
Whether appearing paternal like Vučić or with barely veiled threats like Vučеvić and even more the anonymous authors of SNS’s attack on the public broadcaster RTS, all SNS representatives stress that the party and the party alone is the guarantor of peace and stability.
As much SNS stresses peace and stability, the situation is obviously beyond the party’s control and all appeals and threats seem to fall on deaf ears.
Two Weeks Ago, SNS Could Raise the Dead
Even before the blockade of Novi Sad’s brigdes across the Danube ended, students and thousands of sympathizers started blocking several bridges in Niš in the south of the country. If anything, this revolution seems to pick up momentum.
Local SNS functionaries, who often hold elected offices such as mayor, can only watch as students and sympathizers hold rallies in their towns and block neuralgic streets. Their attempts to deny them entry or at least make them feel unwelcome have all failed.
Such as with Marko Gašić, the mayor of Inđija in Vojvodina. When students from the capital city of Beograd embarked on a footmarch to join their fellow students in Novi Sad for Saturday’s blockade, Gašić hat the local gym closed in which they were supposed to sleep for the night.
Thousands of the small town’s inhabitants cheered the students as heroes and liberators as they entered Inđija, lit a firework, cooked for them and prepared the local soccer field as an impromptu accomodation for those students for whom there was no place in the many private homes citizens opened to them.
Gašić could only watch this from his dark office, the scene an embodiment of impotence.
And this in a country where until roughly two weeks ago the political system Vučić had built around himself and SNS seemed omnipotent. As some critics joked bitterly, SNS could even raise the dead – particularly at election time.
That there ever is a return to the status quo ante seems unlikely.
Crumbling Bastions of Power
„There is a wide societal consensus that we must change something, that nothing can be done the same way as before“, public prosecutor Bojana Savović said in an interview with the private independent broadcaster N1 on Sunday.
She also critized the prosecutors investigating the catastrophe in Novi Sad on November 1st for being too cautious in informing the public, and hinted that investigations had revealed widespread corruption in the construction sector. „Some of these issues have been known for years, and we really expect an answer to all these questions“.
Savović isn’t the only jurist in the public service to voice public criticism and to publicy support the students. In the past weeks, several courts have participated in the 15 minutes of silence held for the 15 victims of the catastrophe of Novi Sad held at 11:52 AM every day or, in some places, at least weekly.
Dozens of judges have publicly pledged their support with the students‘ demands in the past two weeks or so.
In addition to that, the Bar Association decided in an urgent meeting on Sunday that Serbia’s lawyers will go on a one month long strike to support the students‘ blockade and will stage a rally of its own in front of the public broadcaster RTS next week.
It seems that substantial part of Serbia’s judicial system are also openly opposing the country’s political system that has hitherto held a firm grip on the judiciary branch.
People Have Lost Their Fear
And what was even unthinkable a week ago now happens perhaps not across the board but on a wide scale: Political obituaries on Aleksandar Vučić are being written. On Sunday, CNN dedicated a lengthy piece on Serbia’s political crisis: „How a train station tragedy threatens to bring down a hardline European president“
In an interview with the Croatian platform Index, Goran Ješić from the newly founded movement Solidarnost in Serbia openly said: „Vučić is finished, the streets are no longer his“. The question was how power would be handed over.
Some critics and experts say that Vučić seeks to survive politically by heading for snap elections that are held under the control of the acting government – all of whose members are political allies.
Others think it is already too late for that, and that Serbia’s angry citizens would not accept such a transparent and self serving political manouever.
Some are not as optimistic. „We could still see a situation like with (President Aleksandar) Lukašenko in Belarus or a civil war“, a political activist and close observer of the situation told me about his worries today. This is a fear some still seem to have – even though it is unclear how SNS could try and orchestrate a crack down of the ongoing revolution at this stage.
Though numbers are very incomplete and unreliable, up to half a million people are said to have participated in protests this Saturday and Friday last week respectively. Throw in what’s known from quieter days, and factor in that probably not all the people participated on both of these larger protest days, and that some people are on strike but for one reason or another have not attended any demonstrations, one ends up with a number of well in excess of half a million people who have participated so far. In a country of roughly 6.5 million inhabitants, children included, this is a substantial part of the population.
SNS of course insists that these numbers are highly exaggerated – while seeming unable to mobilize the 700.000 members the party officially has. Moreover, none of SNS’s top representatives seems to grasp the dimension the mass protests in the country have reached, and how many of the traditional bastions of governmental power such as the judicial branch seem to be crumbling at the moment.
„People have lost their fear“, more than one activist or observer told me the past few days. In a system built around the authority and power of one man, fear is an essential factor in maintaining power. As is the appearance of being all powerful. Both factors seem to evaporate ever faster.
It Won’t Be How It Was
It looks like twilight has descended upon the Kingdom of Aleksandar. How he ever is to return to the bright days of old glory, or at least some sunny days, seems mysterious – from his perspective.
From the perspective of those who participate in Serbia’s revolution, bright days will dawn once he’s left office or is at least restricted to his constitutional and largely ceremonial role.
One way or another, everyone involved hopes that the twilight will soon pass. Which side will see bright days is by no means certain. For, if history teaches one thing, it’s that revolutions can also fail.
Although this doesn’t seem very likely in Serbia. Even if Vučić manages to hang on – and he is a survivor – his grip on power will not be as firm as before, and serious concessions will have to be made.
Title photo: Screenshot from drone footage by N1
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