Walking into a drugstore located in Belgrade’s Zvezdara municipality, I once overheard a pharmacist explaining to one of her customers that she should just bribe the doctor she needs to, so her grandson would be taken off the waiting list for a tonsillectomy. Oh, and in her opinion, the boy shouldn’t be taken to what is colloquially known as the City Hospital, because she believes that the staff there is incompetent.
In a country where medical staff will shamelessly stonewall you while you wait for your dying parents to be taken in so they can spend their last days in hospitals that don’t have proper toilets, until you produce enough foreign cash for them, and where ubiquitous power booths where you have to bend the knee before the allmighty clerk are present in both the government run venues and in privately owned companies, it’s really no wonder that demagogues promising to end the corruption run the show.
Living in a society that has considered itself a failure since the nineties is a mix of anxiety (gee, what will happen next) and fatalism (welp, we can’t do anything about it, anyway). Motivated by their own version of the end times fascism, common people here decided to snatch what they can, while they can, drink and be merry, for tomorrow they might die.
Here’s an example of how this culture of shortsighted greed and callousness persists. The recent string of fires that plagued Serbia, some of my infinitely clueless compatriots asked why Serbia hasn’t had Canadair aerial firefighting planes for 20 years now.
That’s because those planes were sold to Greece thirty years ago, you idiots. It was the decision of the Yugoslav, Serbian, and Montenegrin governments at the time.
Fire-fighting aircraft, “Bombardier CL 215” from the fire-fighting squadron of the then Yugoslav Army, four of them with 13 spare engines and complete supporting equipment, took off from the Golubovci airport in Montenegro for the last time in mid-1995. Their final destination was Athens, where they were sold to a Greek businessman for the paltry price of 24.4 million dollars.
It’s the same government we have in Serbia now, only reshuffled.
The same government that simply snatched the foreign currency savings of Serbian citizens back in 1992. The Serbian and Yugoslav authorities that succeeded Milosevic decided in 2002. to return the money through bond emissions in the value of 4.2 billion euros. Guess who voted against the law that allowed the money to be returned? The Serbian Radical Party, the former political organization of our current administration.
That is run by this guy:
Nothing says fight against corruption like such a statement from the parliament’s pulpit.
The efforts by the democratic governments to curb the pervasive daylight robberies of everything in existence up until 2012 only served as more proof to the electorate that “everyone steals”. Otherwise, how else would they catch any thieves if there wasn’t any corruption? So the Mr. and Mrs. Average decided to end the corruption by electing an uncorrupt government, consisting of people who presided over totally uncorrupt Yugoslav wars. Ever since the elections in 2003, Vojislav Šešelj’s Serbian Radical Party and Milošević’s Serbian Socialist Party were the most popular voting blocs in Serbia.
When I complained to my glassy-eyed compatriots back in 2013 about the constant public threats, both in real life and online, of common supporters of our new old government that they will hunt down “pro-EU traitors”, all I got as an answer was “I don’t like Vučić, and I never voted for him, but it’s good that they are back, they’ll sort out corruption”.
Where are Serbian citizens getting these ideas, anyway? A combination of vicious agitprop and the social pressure from their peers.
When a loudmouth cousin or a neighbour or a coworker, and sometimes even a rando in the street, gets in your face about traitors that ruined Serbia after 2000 and who extradited our “heroes” to the war crimes tribunal, it is considered a faux pas to tell them to piss off. You never know whose favor you’re gonna have to ask if their kid works at the municipality, or maybe they know someone in the police department to get your passport done faster.
The hordes of sages that started invading the national TV and newspapers after the fall of Milošević are a different pair of sleeves. Their endless virtue-signaling about how corruption is the greatest evil plaguing Serbia echoed from eternal talk shows, public panels and conferences, opinion pieces, and then the social media posts when the technology afforded every idiot on this planet with their own digital bullhorn. Their tirades were safe and fashionable, unlike speaking out against organized crime or war criminals.
When I would confront my family as to why they would listen as hypnotized by the droning of demagogues coming from the television set, their response was “Look how fat and well dressed they are!”. In their minds, these were the People of Awesomeness, fat and well-dressed, who lived in that magical Serbian capital of Belgrade, so they must be really smart.
Not exactly a new phenomenon, and not limited to Serbia:
Here we are in 2025, with the Serbian electorate having buyer’s remorse, trying to process how it is possible that patriots led by Aca the Serb are not all that great.
But never fear, dear reader. The next generation of brave anti-corruption rebels, led by the student protesters, is here…to hunt down those pro-European traitors and rough ’em up.
Serbianism 