The article “Serbia’s Slow Strangulation: How Vučić Perfected Europe’s Democratic Decay” by The Editorial is an excellent example of the unhelpful reflections upon the state of Serbia’s internal affairs.
These copy-paste conventional wisdoms about the situation in Serbia are a dime a dozen, pushing imaginary narratives but have no grounds in reality. Yes, this is a paternalist autocracy – it was re-elected as such back in 2012. Electorate here knew full well what Vučić is – and they love it (sort of).
This particular government is the rehash of the Slobodan Milošević one back in the 1990s. You know, the war criminal. The parties that make it up are the most popular voting bloc since 2003. The diehard statists and revanchists who make up the Serbian voting base are rather cool with it.
They want it to be repressive – it’s their thing. “Might makes right”, “life is a bitch, and then you die,” and so on. One of the talking points of Vučić’s political organization, ever since it was created by Vojislav Šešelj (another dude tried for war crimes), was anti-corruption demagogy.
Of course the student popular front emulates their success, all the while offering territorial grievances and anti-Western hysteria, just like their role models that their parents and grandparents always supported. To them, democracy is a Western plot to ruin Serbian traditional values.
They got the whole shabang – Soros funding migrants to replace the indigenous Serbs, LGBT agenda to pervert the youth, commie atheists assaulting the Church (Serbian people will never call themselves Christian, BTW, they refer to themselves as Serb Orthodox).
While their peers in Iran were mass murdered by the ruling theocrats, Serbian student protesters hold their rallies on religious holidays, sporting obscene amounts of icons and far-right iconography, like they did on January 27th in Belgrade, St. Sava Day, ironically named “Knowledge is power” because that screams “Vote me!” to Vucic’s electorate, the only people whose votes everyone’s after.
As to why a good portion of people appreciate Vučić’s “economic accomplishments” is another point where the foreign commentariat is wrong. Most people here don’t bother with concepts of GDP or whatever, but the round-the-clock government propaganda boasts “new roads and factories”.
Vučić and his big tent coalition are the only ones who keep talking about this local brand of state capitalism. His opponents avoid the economic topics, but focus on supposedly patriotic ones instead. And that is no one’s fault but their own.
The only economy talking points you hear from the folks opposed to Vučić come down to a cookie-cutter tirade about “focusing on our own resources, IT, village tourism, and agriculture and driving out foreign (read: Western) exploitative investors.”
The parochial Serbian mentality sees this country as Arcadia, a pastoral land of honest, hardworking peasants (which has no basis in reality ever since the 1970s), with nature unspoiled and to be preserved from “dirty technologies imported from the West” (driving force for anti-lithium lunacy).
Pushing unrealities and narratives, especially those written and spoken by clueless or ideologically invested foreigners, is NOT helping the situation. As per usual, this article also criticizes the EU, based on an imaginary European responsibility for the state of Serbian affairs.
Humans of planet Earth: Serbia became a candidate in 2012 BEFORE Vučić’s party was re-elected. Any progress to ascension has been effectively stopped since 2021. The EU is not “playing nice” with authorities in Belgrade because they are corrupt, or for geopolitics, or for lithium.
Who’s in power here is not something the EU has any control over. The desire for Brussels influence to exert policy change or government change somewhere is either based on cluelessness or is simply ever-popular EU bashing that is fashionable and safe.
The European Union is not capable of reigning in Hungary, even though Article 7 is in the works – how would Brussels ever handle Serbia? Not to mention that Europeans know all too well that any such attempt would instantly be weaponised as propaganda.
In the European context (or any other context, for that matter), Serbia’s Serbian-made problems can only serve as cautionary tales.
Serbianism 