Following the statement by the European Union (EU) Commissioner for Enlargement, Marta Kos, that the European Commission is still assessing whether to release the funds earmarked for Belgrade under the Growth Plan, she came under media and commentariat fire from both dominant political tribes in Serbia. The funds are valued at 1.5 billion Euros, and Serbia was already repeatedly warned by the European Commission that the regression of reforms and its close ties to Russia could lead to funds being withheld. No final decision has been made. Marta Kos’ meeting in Brussels with the Belgrade University rector, Vladan Djokic, also didn’t endear her to the Serbian right-wing.
Vladan Djokic recently came into the media spotlight after addressing the student protesters who gathered following the unexplained death of a female student whose body was found in front of the Philosophy Faculty building in Belgrade, and the subsequent police raid.
Djokic’s meeting with Kos did not endear him to either the ruling coalition nor to the student movement supporters.
Media and the commentariat from both opposed isles deemed the possibility of withholding the EU funds as “punishing of Serbia” and proceeded to blast Kos as an alleged informant of the former federal State Security Directorate (UDBA) of communist Yugoslavia.
You see, the narcissism and victimhood complex of the “suffering Serbian people” is best cured by bending over for them and giving them oodles of other people’s cash.
In her native Slovenia, Marta Kos is being probed under an accusation of working for UDBA as an informant. It is a part of Janez Janša’s, a prominent Slovenian right-wing politician, McCarthyist witch hunts, where everyone he and his confederates don’t like get branded as “commies”.
The entire affair is now being taken to a hearing in the European Parliament.
It is also a common practice in Serbian slur campaigns, whether public or in private relations, to brand someone as an associate of “The Service”, which is how the secret police was always referred to here, to ruin their reputation and shut them up.
The same goes for branding someone as “pro-European”, which has become synonymous with “traitor”. While rector Djokic, compared to previous possible leaders of the student movement, is genuinely tactful and courteous in his public demeanor and isn’t spouting nationalist vitriol, being associated with anything “European” or “Western” will not endear him to the increasingly radicalized electorate.
Marta Kos and the rest of the European Commission, along with the West at large, are already scapegoated as enablers of Vučić.
In the Land of Somebody Else’s Fault, it is much safer and more fashionable to blame Ursula and Marta – those two won’t be able to retaliate, unlike people who actually voted for Vučić since 1993.
But maybe now they will vote for a Serbian Peter Magyar?
After the elections in Hungary that ousted the elective kleptocracy of Fidesz, and the local elections in Serbia, the public discourse is still looking for a magical formula that will produce a candidate who will defeat Vučić. In the process, the political soothsayers manage to find all the wrong answers.
The virtual realities being pushed around in the infosphere on how the recent local elections were a great success for the student movement and opposition forces (ya know, those elections that were won by the Progressives), and then foretelling when will our Supreme Commander call snap elections, are not exactly helping anyone.
The “opposition forces” label should also not be used carelessly, seeing how minor alt-righters like “Healthy Serbia” in the municipality of Sevojno, for example, easily side with Vučić’s party when local councils are to be elected after these elections. It does matter WHAT KIND of an opposition party someone is.
“No [to] government, and no [to] stooge fake opposition – just students”, a poster posted by the local board of the Democratic Party, formerly a force to be reckoned with, now a slavish appendage of the student movement. How very Sovietesque. Just a small illustration of how and why no one takes the Democrats seriously anymore.
If the student popular front and the anti-lithium “procesionists” haven’t spent more than two years demonizing centrists and spreading anti-Western hysteria, something might have been achieved by now. People with cell phones in their hands protesting against lithium mining did drive folks away.
Ever since the latest wave of protests in Serbia started, everyone even remotely interested in it is obsessed with trying to guess what will Vučić do or won’t do, which is an exercise in futility.
Vučić and his associates have spent all the time in politics since 1993 keeping people on their toes about EVERYTHING. Apart from being a party of war criminals, the Progressives and their previous iteration, the Serbian Radical Party, are also an anti-systemic movement par excellence. These are the Supreme Command of the Crazy, and they raise hell for fun. Kinda useless to try and guess their moves.
Also kinda useless to try to outcrazy them and being more nationalistic and more parochial or whatever. It’s even more useless to try to make comparisons or even hope for the situation in Hungary to reflect on Serbia. Fidesz were simply icky kleptocrats – Progressives are genuinely nasty.
Serbianism 