As mass protests in Serbia show no sign of abating, and the country’s immediate political future looks uncertain, European governments try to appear ostentatiously neutral. They have a dog in the race.
No one knows how many people exactly attented Saturday’s student rally in Niš in Southern Serbia.
Thousands of students had marched to the rally from all over Serbia all through the past week, and they were joined by tens of thousands of fellow citizens, many of them from the city itself, many having driven to the rally from places as far away as Novi Sad in the North.
While according to all available information, the rally in Niš wasn’t Serbia’s biggest mass protest against corruption in the past few months, it was still huge.
There were parallel, smaller, protests the same day in many cities, towns and villages, including the capital Beograd, and Novi Sad, which has become the hotspot for the mass protests that have dominated public space in Serbia for over three months now and have at least officially toppled the country’s government.
In dozen of places the Serbian dijaspora abroad staged solidarity protests, like in Vienna.
Whatever one makes of this protest movement, and whether or not one agrees with the goals and the strategy of the students who lead it – this is undeniably a huge popular movement, and literally countrywide at that.
And for all its official goals, even in the watered down version presented in Niš on Saturday, it addresses what we have been told for decades are European values: Equal rights and dignity for all, freedom of press, the rule of law, a society and a state working towards the common good.
None of this is guaranteed under the current political system, the students say – and so do literally hundreds of thousands of Serbians who have participated in the mass protests over the past threee months.
Many ordinary people all over the world agree, and have sent messages of support and solidarity, looking at the students of Serbia as a beacon of hope for democracy and a better future in a world that seems to take a turn for the worse ever faster.
No Official Support by Any Government
To date, no government or national parliament has come out in support of the students of Serbia, not even in the so called democratic West, and certainly not in the European Union – while those same European governments and parliaments who remain silent on this issue are invoking „European values“ and „Western values“ at an almost inflationary rate these days as they try to come to terms with Trumpian politics.
They were not so silent in a situation that at least bears some similarities with the situation in Serbia eleven years ago. Similarities that, incidentally, Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić implicitly addresses when he portraits the mass protests as a „color revolution“ he will defeat.
That is the series of events in the Ukraine that became to be known as Euromaidan and now are called the „Revolution of Dignity“ in the Ukraine.
Euromaidan vs. Current Mass Protests in Serbia
When tens of thousands of Ukrainians occupied Kiev’s central Maidan after then Ukrainian President Viktor Januković had reneged on a treaty of association with the EU, and tried to have police forcefully disperse the protesters, leading politicians from EU countries rushed to condemn the violence and supported the protesters.
Most major media portraited the revolt as a nationwide revolution, as a democratic uprising against a dictatorial regime with close ties to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
They are largely silent about the mass protests in Serbia.
Of course, there are some key differences in the situation.
There has been no police violence in Serbia that was even remotely on the scale we saw at Euromaidan – and certainly no mass shootings. Likewise, Serbian protesters have not formed armed militia, not at the beginning, and not now.
From their side, there have been very sporadic outbreaks of very mild violence, such as tossing eggs at police like on Tuesday, or the not entirely polite eviction of a leading official Serbia’s ruling party SNS in Bogatić, and none of them came from the students but from ordinary townsfolk.
After some smaller initial clashes, police, too, were very reluctant to use force against protesters – whether or not this is owed to a public backlash after students were beaten up and arrested during the first stage of the protests or whether from a deeply held conviction that the protesters are exercising their democratic rights, is irrelevant.
That’s not to say there hasn’t been any violence against students and other protesters. Small gangs of thugs assaulted students at dozens of protests. On at least three occasions car drivers ran over and injured protesters on what seems to be purpose. Several of the suspects have been identified as sympathizers with or even activists of SNS.
One of these assaults officially forced the Serbian government to resign. The resignation is not in force yet.
Police and the Serbian intelligence agency BIA invited students who they identified as leaders for „cautionary“ or „informative interviews“. This didn’t bother anyone much outside of Serbia. Only when police deported several foreign nationals BIA accused of collaborating with foreign agencies to further the protests in order to destabilize Serbia, did EU governments issue diplomatic notes of protests.
When Serbian police searched the premises of several critical NGOs who had received funding from USAID last week, this got a bit of attention in major media outside of Serbia. It was largely seen as an attempt by the Serbian government to silence critical voices in the wake of Elon Musk’s lie campaign against the US government agency.
Only the EU parliament discussed events in Serbia once. While many MPs expressed their sympathy with the student movement, there was no official resolution or vote either way.
Also, no serious attempts by EU officials or officials of its member governments have been documented to arbitrate a solution to what’s clearly a fundamental political crisis in Serbia – a country that, unlike Ukraine eleven years ago, is officially a candidate for EU membership.
And we can make the case that these mass protests represent the opinion of the Serbian population at large to a higher degree than Euromaidan represented that of the Ukrainian population.
For one, Euromaidan was largely restricted to larger cities and towns, with the overwhelming focus being on the capital Kiev and the West of the country. There were very few protests in the South and East.
In Serbia, there has not been a single county without protests in about the same amount of time Euromaidan played out – roughly three months. People have taken to the streets even in small villages. See this list compiled by the NGO Arhiv javnih skupova. They just show the week between February 17 and 23.
Note: These are just the protests for which the organisation could compile enough material to estimate the number of participants. Many rallies are not included, especially not the daily protests in larger cities such as Beograd and Novi Sad.
In by far most of these rallies, more than five per cent of the population took to the streets, the record being held by the villages of Veliko Bonjicne in the South and Belanovica in Central Serbia, with 20 and roughly 50 per cent of the population respectively.
True, in these instances the number of participants may have been bolstered by people from neighboring villages or small groups of students. Nevertheless, they reflect general and serious dissatisfaction by large parts of the population.
It’s The Economy Stupid
No matter what one thinks about the mass protests in Serbia – what can not be denied is that they are a democratic movement, vis a vis the constitutional government in Serbia. Even if one disagrees with methods, strategies or goals of the mass protests, they are something to be taken seriously, and they constitute a substantial political crisis in a country that officially seeks membership with the European Union.
So, from any point of view, one would think that this is a matter officials of EU governments or the EU itself would be eager to get resolved somehow.
They are not.
They are not for the same reason they were so eager to have the situation resolved during Euromaidan.
To simplify it a bit: Euromaidan was mainly about whether the Ukraine should remain an economic colony of Russia or become an economic colony of the EU and the USA respectively.
The treaty of association between the Ukraine and the EU was supposed to initiate the latter. People in the West of the country welcomed this development and saw their interests best served if the country’s ressources were sold out to the West.
People in the East and South feared it would be detrimental to their interests if they stopped selling out to Russia – largely regardless of ethnic affiliation.
Most opinion polls in the country showed a small majority supporting Euromaidan, and just shy of half of Ukrainians being opposed to the protests.
Much of what happened later is a continuation of this political and economic conflict between the EU and the USA and Russia. It was in the EU’s geostrategic interest to have Euromaidan succeed. So European political leaders spoke out on behalf of democracy and European values, and so did most media outlets in the US.
Severe Russian meddling and support of a corrupt regime does not change the cynicism that very much was part of the general European stance on Euromaidan. Neither does that cynicism diminish the even greater Russian cynicism that eventually led to its war of aggression against the Ukraine. It is even less of an excuse for anything that happened since 2014.
In Serbia, European governments see their interests best served if the status quo is maintained.
While student protests were already dominating public space in Serbia, Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz invited Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić to a meeting in Saxony.
The protests, ignited by the collapse of the canopy of the freshly train station of Novi Sad that killed 15 people in November 1, and the suspicion that corruption ultimately caused the catastrophe, do not seem to have been discussed at the meeting.
Scholz and Vučić talked about the planned lithium mines in western Serbia.
Batteries need lithium.
Electric cars need batteries.
Europe’s climate policies need a lot of electric cars.
The German car industry is the most important on the continent.
Vučić has largely committed to letting European economies exploit Serbia’s lithium reserves.
Russia and China also have their eyes on it.
Vučić has maintained a precarious balance of power between the EU, China and Russia ever since he took office. often playing one against the other.
For Scholz, and his likely successor Friedrich Merz, keeping the Serbian President committed to the deal is crucial.
Movements that could topple him, or at least restrict him to his largely ceremonial constitutional role, are the potential risk of losing access to a much needed ressource. This is particularly true of the current protest movement.
The lithium mines in Serbia are largely unpopular, and people in the Jadar and Drina valley, where the mines are supposed to be built, have joined up with the students‘ protests.
Supporting Serbia’s mass protests would or at least could endanger the EU’s and particularly Germany’s economic interests.
At the same time, speaking out against protests that are evidently supported by large parts of the population in order to obviously secure a vital deal in natural ressources would look like open hypocrisy. Europe’s political shift towards the right hasn’t gone far enough in order to make this seem tolerable.
This is also true if one regards the mass protests as illegitimate, whether on formal or other grounds. They are a large enough movement no one who actually or supposedly stands for liberty and democracy can just publicly denounce and not look like a hypocrite.
Better duck and hope it goes away, one way or the other.
European values, it seems, mean something different from what we believe.
Now we see them applied.
Title photo: Filippo Cadili
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