A ruling party “United Serbia” campaign event in Novi Sad, Serbia, was attended by the Slovak PM Robert Fico. Fico praised Aleksandar Vučić’s leadership and said Slovakia would continue to respect Serbia’s territorial integrity, including Kosovo.
Welp, that will also endear him to the Student Ticket.
Vučić used the opportunity to accuse unspecified foreign powers of financing protests following the Novi Sad canopy collapse – the Serbian government’s propaganda, backed by Russian agitprop, maintains that he protest are an attempt at a colored revolution. The event was also marked by iconography celebrating Ratko Mladić, a convicted war criminal.
At least this time nothing burned down after the United Serbia rally, as it did in Niš on October 5th, when the fireworks display by the ruling party supporters set fire to the Niš medieval fort.
Foreigners can’t understand why Serbdom is so much better than developed countries. Unlike those, we have freedom here – the freedom to torch the place and make TikTok videos about it.
The Student Ticket aligned media, for some reason, thinks that the foreign audience should be informed that the Kosovo police removed the “Students are winning” (Studenti pobeđuju) banners in Laplje Selo. Foreign election campaigns are against the law in Kosovo. Both the ruling Serbian Progressives and the Students keep accusing their opponents of having “sold out Kosovo to Albanians” and that Albin Kurti, the Kosovo PM, either secretly or openly supports the opposing camp in Serbia. “Kurti’s terror”, an alleged campaign of persecution of Serbs in Kosovo, is a common, popular narrative.
Neck-deep in nationalist, revanchist rhetoric, the Student Ticket does its darnedest to scare the living daylights out of the non-nationalist part of the electorate. The latest such stunt is a GenAI video depicting the Students as the participants of the First Serbian Uprising of 1804 (NSFW).
It portrays them mobilizing supposedly docile, spoiled people of Serbia, while the leader of the Uprising, Karadjordje Petrović, displays a severed head of an Ottoman-era Turk. Yup, just what the doctor ordered – after the veiled threats on X aimed at the “European Serbia” leaders Students made gore-fest hero-fantasy AI slop.
Vučić’s campaign pushes the whole “stability” vibes common with Dear Leaders and their bands of 40 thieves, while promising more helicopter money after the elections are over (and they win, of course). The conservative, die-hard statist electorate does perceive the student protests as disruptive, lazy kids who should be at school or working, not “trying to bring down the State(TM)”. So trying to appear more crazy than the Supreme Commanders of Craziness we have in power now isn’t exactly winning many votes, quite the opposite.
Which doesn’t stop the pro-Student public figures from declaring victory in advance – a moral victory. See, the Mr. and Mrs. Vučić Supporters (the “ćaci”, as they are mockingly called) are seen as corrupt, cowardly, uneducated, low-class people, as opposed to brave, educated, untarnished 50-year old “students”, who are radiating Freedom-loving Magical Beams of Righteousness from their clear eyes and pure hearts. No wonder the ruling party members seem relaxed – the Student Ticket apparently hopes for divine intervention, possibly from Karadjordje’s ghost summoned by the AI-slop they keep making.
On a more lighter note, these elections brought back Bogoljub Karić, an oligarch (or a tycoon, as we call them in Serbia) who got his wealth during the 1990s, and who ran a populist presidential campaign in 2004, coming in third, and his Strength of Serbia Movement made surprisingly good results in municipal and local elections. He went into exile in Moscow in 2006 after the Serbian Prosecutor’s Office began an investigation against him regarding the establishment of the “Mobtel” cellphone operator service and enabling companies from Cyprus to obtain foreign currency loans from Astra Bank without guarantees. He returned to Serbia after the charges were dropped in 2016 and has been politically aligned with Aleksandar Vučić. A sizable portion of the electorate genuinely enjoys Karić’s jovial, low-brow public appearances. The rest consider him clownish and politically toxic.
Mr. Karić Karić was sanctioned by the European Union because he is believed to have close ties with the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, and he is also sanctioned by Switzerland.
