As in most countries that hold elections, the local elections in Serbia are traditionally viewed by the public as a measure of the popularity of the country’s most notable political organizations, but since Vučić’s return to power in 2012, they are also sarcastically referred to as the festivities of democracy.
Local elections were held this Sunday in three municipalities in Serbia – Mionica, Sečanj, and Negotin.
A fight broke out in a tavern in Mionica after the Serbian version of titushky, who attacked the opposition Green-Left Front MP Bogdan Radovanović, retreated into that building and threw bottles at the crowd in front of the establishment.
The police intervened afterwards, and their arrival was documented by videos from the scene. Radovanović was taken away by ambulance and suffered a hematoma on his head. More than 10 people were injured during the altercation.
Preliminary results of Sunday’s vote at local elections showed a turnout of 48 percent in Negotin, almost 68 percent in Secanj, and 75 percent in Mionic, with the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) claiming victory in all 3 municipalities.
The leader of the Progressive’s Miloš Vučević, said that the SNS won 69.29 percent of the votes cast in Negotin, 64.24 percent in Secanj, and 75 percent in Mionica.
The election day ended with low turnout, parallel gatherings of student protesters and government supporters in front of the Serbian national broadcaster, RTS, headquarters in Belgrade.
So, what gives? How is it that a year of protests didn’t put a dent in Vučić’s big tent coalition rule? For starters, read the previous paragraph.
- Nobody cares anymore – It’s been over a year, and the people are spent. Physically, emotionally, financially. These were the longest protests in Serbia’s history, longer than the 1996-97 student and opposition protests. Eventually, they have to run out of steam.
- The vicious nature of the student movement – The divisiveness and ideological exclusivity of the student and civic protesters, who tried to appeal only to the nationalist voters, while asking for subservience and carte blanche support from everyone else, didn’t exactly endear them to the general public. The revanchist, right-wing nature finally dawned even on the minds of the foreign press. Most of the right-wing, as in Vučić’s electorate, isn’t necessarily unsatisfied with his performance, and their appetites are mostly sated. The attempt to paint themselves as bigger, better patriots while launching smear campaigns and even physical attacks at every perceived “traitor”, thus mimicking the Progressives’ behaviour, eventually left the protesters and every organization and individual that associates with them branded as just as bad as Vučić by the more liberal people – conservatives, centrists, and left wing. The latest escapade between Dijana Hrka and the opposing pro-government camp in downtown Belgrade was just the final nail in the coffin.
- Trying to externalize the problem – In the Serbian paranoid political discourse, everything is a conspiracy, mostly a Western one, sometimes Jewish, sometimes even the lizard aliens. Blaming everything on the European Union’s perceived stabilocracy that supposedly engineered Vučić’s rise to power so that the Collective West can “claim” Kosovo or keeping him to extract lithium or whatever resources people here imagine Serbia has in abundance (it does not) is exactly out of the playbook of the right-wing forces that produced the previous authoritarian government back in the 1990s. You do not fight this fire with fire, and the majority of EU-haters are still firmly in the government voting camp. Students and their “witnesses,” as some more witty netizens tend to call their slavish supporters, only amplified pro-government propaganda by parroting it.
- No motivation to participate – The Serbian expression “Kurta i Murta” refers to the entrenched notion of “out with the old boss, in with the new boss”, meaning that any sort of new leadership won’t change anything in common people’s lives. Some even go as far as to claim that these two opposed camps are “Kurta i Kurta”, as many of the very familiar faces that belong to the far-right and far-left movements in Serbia, who were previously aligned with either Milošević, Šešelj, and Vučić, now hold sway over the opposing camp. There was never really any positive messaging coming from the student camp, as in how anyone’s lives are going to be improved by changing the government, other than maybe vague notions of fewer canopies crashing per capita. The only goal was “bring down Vučić and keep up the same policies, but we’ll be uncorrupt”.
- Lack of moral compass – Any sort of criticism of a corrupt kakistocracy starts with allegations of corruption, and there are plenty of those allegations that are true. But the problem that the students created for themselves is two-fold. The cynical Serbian society has a derogatory expression, “Drž’te lopova!”. It means “Catch the thief!”. It is meant to ridicule the anti-corruption demagoguery of thieves who try to shift the blame and attention from themselves by looking for crime in others. The constant appeals for handouts and monetary aid by protesters and their confederates did not go unnoticed, like in the case of Milomir Jaćimović. Many an onlooker will deduce that the protesters are just as bad as the government and its supporters and that they are only in it for the money, thus fortifying the belief present in many failed societies that everyone is crooked, given the opportunity, so no point in trying to make yourselves or the society any better. The loss of support for the student national populists is then multiplied when they champion “the Serbian people”, the same people who often speak very lowly of themselves by often claiming, without giving away such thoughts to foreigners, how we are collectively incorrigible or even crazy. The duplicity of criticising Vučić for authoritarianism, yet trying to “save” the supposed sanctity of Serbian wars of conquest and oppression, also raised many eyebrows, like in the recent protests against the deal involving the General Staff building and Jared Kushner.
- Failure of Instagram realities – Many people quickly lost faith in Milošević’s lying televisions and newspapers. They also quickly lost faith in anything that the Progressives’ media agitation has to say and show. It didn’t take long to stop believing or even listening to preachy, yet foul-mouthed, student social media accounts. But in an attempt to woo the nationalist audience, the media that isn’t aligned to the ruling coalition, such as N1 television and media portal, or the papers such as Danas and Vreme, that do keep high standards in investigative reporting, moved their pundits and ideological messaging over the far-right edge of the world, making them sometimes indistinguishable from tabloids. This only drove the opposition audience away, from both the media in question and away from the student and civic movement they supported. This particular Reddit thread is a good illustration of how there is a perception that only a national, parochial is acceptable, while every other set of beliefs is somehow alien to the majority in Serbia.
- Dragging other people’s wars to Serbia – The protesters shilling for the Palestinian nationalist cause and their support for the Russian imperialist war against Ukraine is not “rebelling against the system”, it’s actually supporting authoritarianism in Serbia. Many here in Serbia are genuinely enamoured of everything and anyone authoritarian and totalitarian, as long as it has branded itself as anti-Western, but it doesn’t mean they will switch camps and move from the SNS support to the students.
- Focus on magical thinking and religious processions – The anti-lithium protests are often described as anti-lithium religious processions because of the predominant Orthodox imagery and paraphernalia that adorned such gatherings, which didn’t bring in more crowds of an already superstitious society, but it did drive away more rational participants. The recent protests in Smederevo over a railway carrying LNG, marked by clashes with the police, had the visiting speakers to the gathered crowd waste everyone’s time by droning on about the local church’s iconostasis. On the other hand, simply repeating the laundry list of the ruling coalition’s transgressions (many of them real financial scandals and abuses of power, but many of them silly banalities them perceived as grave insults to public morals) felt more like trying to invoke magic spells that will topple Vučić by the force of wishing it hard enough, instead of, say, actually voting for an opposition party. The protests also became a form of ritual – it’s the weekend, so let’s go protesting.
- It is impossible to overpower the security forces – The Serbian well-paid and competent police force, augmented by hooligan groups, and with the military staying firmly at the side of the government, is an insurmountable obstacle. This was well evidenced during the March 15th protests and the LRAD incident. Doxxing the police officers and constant public threats of purging the security apparatus after the government change didn’t do the student and civic movement any favors, and is a good illustration of the protesters’ inability to build bridges with anyone, but they are good at burning them. The efficient, although no-nonsense, manner in which the police handle the protests has solidified the support for the government in the minds of the conservative voters.
- No sympathy was ever elicited, nor would it do any good – The government’s oppression against the protesters and their supporters never swayed the public in favor of the students. Serbia is very callous; victim-blaming is the norm. “Yeah, but what was she wearing when he raped her?” or “Why didn’t he watch and pay attention when he was crossing the street?” are perfectly acceptable reactions to news of other people’s suffering. Elon Musk would be proud – Serbs don’t do that empathy thing.
There are three dates to remember that mark all the things wrong with the Serbian non-revolution:
- 22nd December 2024 – the well-documented physical altercation aimed at the people carrying the EU flag, which was widely used by the pro-government media to underscore the divisions in the protests, and by the protester supporters to signal how they are, in fact, good old-fashioned Serbian “patriots” that will drive away the pro-EU “traitors”. In their minds, Vučić is too much pro-European, too much pro-Albanian, not enough pro-Russian.
- 15th March 2025 – the gathering dispersed by the alleged use of the sonic cannon. Yes, alleged, as long as the Srebrenica genocide is alleged in the minds of the student movement, the LRAD use is also alleged. While the tactics employed for crowd control in this case were insidious, the cowardly reaction of protesters who supposedly are ready to go to war over Kosovo did not impress anyone.
- 28th June 2025 – The date for the student nationalist rally was chosen because that was the date when, in 1989, at Gazimestan field in Kosovo, Slobodan Milošević ascended himself as a paramount leader of Serbs in both Serbia proper and in the neighbouring socialist republics of former Yugoslavia, invoking a decade of bloody expansionist warfare during the Yugoslav wars. The students and their confederates wanted to present themselves as holier than thou, a new, improved, third version of far-right Serbian revanchists, just like Milošević and his entourage were.
Serbianism 