Serbia's student-led protesters wanted accountability. Now they're calling for elections

France 24

a day ago

For the past three nights, Serbia 's streets have been shaken by fierce clashes between thousands of anti-government protesters and ranks of masked ruling party loyalists.
The student-led demonstrators have accused the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS)'s supporters of hurling flares, fireworks, rocks and glass bottles at them, triggering street skirmishes that ended with riot police driving the anti-government protesters off with tear gas and batons.
Dozens of people have been injured and scores more arrested.
President Alexandar Vučić, who began his political career in the far-right Serbian Radical Party before becoming a proponent of European Union membership, has promised that more arrests will soon follow. Vučić has accused the demonstrations, without evidence, of being plotted from abroad by unidentified foreign powers.
The clashes mark a serious escalation in what has been more than nine months of largely peaceful protests and waves of civil disobedience.
The demonstrations erupted in November following the fatal collapse of a concrete canopy in a recently renovated railway station that killed 16 people in Serbia's second city of Novi Sad – an accident that protesters, who have taken a blood-red handprint as their symbol, blame on cronyism and graft within Serbia's government and construction industry.
Since then, a student-led movement of hundreds of thousands of Serbians have held mass demonstrations, occupied university campuses and blockaded the Balkan country's roads to protest what they describe as rampant government corruption.
FRANCE 24 spoke with University of Belgrade Serbian Politics professor Nebojša Vladisavljević about how the mass protests have changed over the course of a struggle that how now lasted more than nine months.
FRANCE 24: How have the mass demonstrations evolved in recent months, and why have their demands expanded?
In the first few months, the demands of the protesters focused on the legal and political responsibility of those responsible for the deaths of 16 people in Novi Sad – meaning those involved in the renovation of the railway station, but also their political bosses. So the focus was on the judiciary, the prosecution service to initiate legal proceedings against these guys. But obviously that didn't work out, despite massive protests.
These are unprecedented protests in this region, and probably even more broadly in Europe in the last few decades. The country is about 6 million people and you had literally hundreds of thousands of people protesting for months. Only in Belgrade, you had four protests in several months, each larger than a hundred thousand people. And Belgrade is a city of a million and a half. And one of these protests in mid-March was about 300,000 people, which is four to five percent of the population of the country as a whole, so it's massive.
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The government and the judiciary essentially ignored their demands for accountability. Even after several months, these proceedings that the prosecutors initiated, they were not confirmed by the courts. That obviously told people that nothing will happen.
That's why demands were shifted to the political stage for early parliamentary elections, because it was obvious that under this government, nothing much would happen when it came to these initial demands.
You had very peaceful protests for eight months. And in late June, there was this fourth protest in Belgrade, which was above 100,000 people, and then the police for the first time actually used massive force against peaceful protesters – and that was after the protest, when people were already dispersing. This is a major escalation because prior to late June, essentially the government and the security forces were sitting out protests – they waited for protests to subside exactly in the same way as they did in previous years, because we had several waves of protests in the last few years.
But this time they actually changed strategy and used massive force and detained hundreds of people, most young people, across the country, which then radicalised protests in the following weeks. Earlier, you would have rallies or marches or short blockades of roads these were commemorative road blockades for 16 minutes, for the 16 people killed in Novi Sad. But now, after the use of force by the police, you had road blockades for hours.
And protesters were avoiding contact with the police – whenever the police would come, they would go to another street and then block another street.
In the last few days, we've seen another escalation, which is by the use of the ruling party's hired gangs, who pose as supporters of the ruling party. You recognise them by kind of being uniformly dressed – they're in civilian clothes, but you see that they all have black t-shirts, black short pants, black baseball caps, some are hooded – and they go together, some carrying sticks, to guard offices of the ruling party across the country and provoke protesters so that the police would then beat them up. And that's what we've seen in the last few days.
To what extent do this week's confrontations mark a change in the scale of the mobilisation of these kinds of extra-legal security forces?
It's the question of scale, essentially. They've used these guys often in previous years, but always kind of trying to do it when nobody sees what's going on – so they were used to beat up people here and there on behalf of the ruling party to put pressure on all sorts of people, even their own party members who wouldn't toe the party line, but especially against government critics. But again, not in public, really, and they were rarely uniformly dressed as they are now. So now, they are obvious to everybody.
What we see these days is that they are working closely with the police – in some cases, police are even getting orders from some of them, which is something that we haven't seen before, and we even see some people with criminal records among them. One of the more famous ones is Djordje Prelić, who was convicted for the murder of Brice Taton, the French football supporter who died in Belgrade in 2009, essentially murdered by local thugs. So one of those guys was seen among these titushky in the last few days [Editor's note: A term for mercenary agent provocateurs, often dressed as football hooligans, that was popularised under former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich].
They try to present this now as some sort of counter-mobilisation of supporters of Vučić, but actually, it's not. It just hired gangs. Just a few years ago, the ruling party had the capacity to mobilise quite a few people in support of Vučić and the ruling party. We had several waves of opposition protests in the last few years, and in 2019 the ruling party held a counter rally in Belgrade, which actually mobilised about 60,000 people. It was a very large protest that rivalled the opposition protests.
This year, they tried to do this on several occasions, but actually mobilised very few people – only those who actually had to be there, party officials, public sector workers, some temporary contracts, people on social benefits who are afraid that they will lose some if they don't come. Now they can't even mobilise anybody to come to defend them. That's why they are now using these hired gangs, obviously, because they can't mobilise anybody else.
To what extent is Vučić 's government trying to actively defuse some of these calls for accountability and responsibility rather than merely meeting the protests with naked force?
When it comes to the rhetoric, he's being doing it throughout, trying to pose as if he were doing something to achieve accountability when it comes to what happened in Novi Sad. But actually, they've done nothing much when it comes to this. In late July two former ministers and a few other people, they were arrested for serious charges. Not for small things, but for fraud of over $100 million when it comes to this fast railway from Belgrade to Subotica.
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It's still unclear where it came from – having in mind how the Vučić press and tabloid media attacked those prosecutors who initiated this, it seems that he's losing control over the prosecution service and the judiciary. He obviously has some guys firmly under control. Vucic and his loyalists at the top of the government have been quite nervous when these arrests happened. So it seems that he's losing control within the judiciary at this point. But again, it is really unclear whether this will end up in convictions.
How do you explain Vučić's reticence to call early elections that his coalition might be able to use to bolster its legitimacy in the face of these protests?
The trouble that they face at this point is that their popularity fell substantially in the last few months. It's true that initially many people who were actually government critics and from the opposition didn't want to raise the question of snap elections for several reasons. Firstly, because they felt that this would move attention away from what happened in Novi Sad and from the accountability issue – and that was the stance for most people. But also because they felt that Vučić was still at that point popular and the opposition wouldn't be able to gain much in elections.
But that was early this year. In the meantime, things have changed … There was a credible opinion poll done by two of my colleagues, professors from the faculty of political science at the University of Belgrade. They did a large poll: the government at this point has fewer supporters than the opposition. So it's about 40, 41 percent for the whole ruling coalition and over 50 percent for the opposition.
Now, obviously, we still don't know if we had a snap election whether there will be one opposition list or two or three. But they were assessing all of these possibilities, and whichever possibility you take, whether it's one opposition list or two or three – the opposition wins. The poll was done about a month ago. So, there is a good reason why Vučić avoids early elections at this point – because it seems according to the polls that he would lose even an unfair election, even an authoritarian election. That's why he's trying to kind of postpone this.
But my guess is we will have an election in the next few months. Because the country is totally blocked. Nothing works. You can't do anything – the government has lost the capacity to rule, essentially. The only way out is by elections.