European Central: Protests Grip Serbia And Potentially Threaten Vucic’s Hold On Power
JDawnInk
For the last several months, Serbia has been gripped by massive demonstrations against a repressive and corrupt regime, headed by President Aleksandar Vucic. The protests started in November following the tragic deaths of fifteen people who were killed by the collapse of a concrete overhang at a recently renovated train station in the city of Novi Sad. Opposition politicians and activists were quick to blame the collapsed structure on substandard work by contractors with links to corrupt government officials. The tragedy and the resulting scandal proved to be a catalyst for a nationwide protest movement targeting the upper echelons of Serbia’s leadership, including President Vucic.
Many of the protesters have been students in major cities, such as Belgrade, Serbia’s capital. In an attempt to undermine the protests, in December last year the government offered to provide young people with ‘state-subsidized loans of up to about $100,000 to buy apartments.’ This move highlights just how surprised Serbia’s leadership was by the eruption of democratic activism. Serbia boasts a strong economy, with ‘economic growth that is four times the European average, falling unemployment and steadily rising wages.’ To all appearances, Serbia should be one of the countries least likely to experience a groundswell of protest. However, the students were resolute in their sentiments, with representatives of the student movement giving the government a clear response: ‘Keep your money.’
As the protests escalated, they began to draw interest from beyond the student population. Many older, more rural and less-affluent Serbs, who once formed Vucic’s base of support, have also joined the protests or provided moral support. When university students in Belgrade marched sixty miles through rural Serbia to Novi Sad in early February, farmers gathered on the roadside to cheer them on. However, the marchers were not greeted with universal fanfare. Some supporters of President Vucic placed banners with crude insults and gestures on bridges and buildings in several locations along the protest march route.
One of the driving forces behind the protests has been Vucic’s response to the initial tragedy in Novi Sad. In the aftermath of the collapse, Vucic claimed that the structure had not been part of government financed construction work. Then, Zoran Djajic, an engineer who had worked on the project came forward and publicly stated that ‘a Serbian contractor hired by the Chinese consortium in charge of the renovation had ignored design specifications and dangerously added tons of extra concrete to the canopy.’ ‘Somebody decided to add extra weight on top, and nobody checked whether the canopy could bear it,’ the engineer said in an interview. ‘This was not an accident.’
When Djajic went on the record, media organizations sympathetic to Vucic disparaged him. Nevertheless, his ‘revelations helped set off what has since become Serbia’s biggest outpouring of public discontent since the protests that toppled [Slobodan] Milosevic in 2000.’ University students led the way, ‘demanding that those responsible for the railway station tragedy be held to account and that all contracts and other documents relating to the renovation be made public.’ In the months since the initial protests, the government has publicly released thousands of relevant documents, more than a dozen individuals have been criminally charged for the tragedy in Novi Sad, and the prime minister, Miloš Vučević, a close ally of Vucic, announced his resignation. The protests, however, show little sign of abating.
The question now becomes what exactly do the student protesters want to achieve? Many protesters interviewed by media publications, both Serbian and foreign, have demonstrated little interest in a change of political leadership. Many students have been skeptical that Serbia’s current political system, dominated by institutions sympathetic to Vucic and his party, could produce a better leader. Instead, most protesters have directed their attention not to politics and matters of government, but to corruption and the reform of ‘rotted’ institutions which made the Novi Sad disaster possible. Thus, the ‘students’ strategy [has been] to focus on the Novi Sad station disaster with specific demands for transparency and accountability, and their hope is their dogged insistence on those two scarce commodities will somehow change Serbia.’
To reinforce their apolitical posture, the student protesters ‘have kept their distance from the opposition parties and operate collectively through plenary meetings and direct democracy, with no identifiable leaders the government can target.’ There are good reasons for pursuing this non-partisan and non-confrontational strategy. In the past, Vucic and his supporters had grown adept ‘at sidelining the conventional political opposition, through a mix of government patronage and the threats of character assassination through friendly tabloids, dismissal or financial pressure.’
There have been indications that these student-organized protests have contributed to a wider societal shift in Serbia. There have now been more than two hundred protests in cities and towns across Serbia. Moreover, ‘Internal pressure from journalists has shown signs of changing state media. Pro-government outlets had thus far played down the protests to the point of ignoring them, but the state broadcaster, RTS, showed live pictures of the crowds engulfing Novi Sad.’
Nevertheless, Vucic remains in control of the levers of state power, and unless the protesters choose to escalate their demonstrations and articulate a political argument rather than a social one, that is unlikely to change. ‘There are limits to how the street protests can be articulated in a way to lead to some kind of a transition,’ said Ivanka Popović, a university lecturer and member of the pro-democracy group ProGlas. ‘I think the students have not yet decided how to move forward, which means everything is sort of on hold, and I think Mr. Vučić is taking advantage of this. He’s a very experienced, skilled politician.’ Thus, it appears that, at least for the time being, President Vucic is not going anywhere.