Capital of Serbia, Belgrade likes to think of itself as the epicenter of Balkan coolness – a tourist trap, with exquisite cuisine, popular turbo-folk music to caress your ears, and rich nightlife not to be found elsewhere, just waiting to be discovered by wealthy foreigners ready to spend paper.
Too bad that this video of the aftermath of the Vučić supporter gathering on June 27th can’t convey the eternal stench of urine and feces etched in Belgrade’s reality – we don’t do public restrooms here, ya know, hygiene is too continental for our tastes.
And on June 28th, following in the footsteps of their role models from the ruling coalition, Serbian students were having a shindig of their own in Kraljevo, celebrating the Holy Milošević Day (May He Forever Be Buried In His Backyard Next To His Beloved Wife). See, St. Vitus, 28th of June is only significant if you’re a Serbian right-winger (or running away from them).
Guess those giant crosses and other nationalist iconography the students keep waving around will help with stuff like this ammonia leak in Guča, that injured four people.
The latest rally was nothing but reveling in a victimhood complex about the “Kurti’s terror“, a repeat of the Serbian government propaganda about the supposed persecution of Serbs in Kosovo by the administration of Albin Kurti, with the additional embarrassment of having even more minor alt-righters attach themselves to the student movement. Like the non-parliamentary cleronazi movement “Dveri”, which scored 2.83% of votes in the last election (the threshold is 3 percent), which pledged its full support for the student ticket, because nothing spells “guaranteed success” like backing from people who are too far to the right and too far out even by our standards.
The more liberal minded Serbian citizens have a derogatory nickname for Dveri – Zveri (Beasts), a play on words on their name.
Aleksandar Vučić’s announcement of a possible resignation got many foreign onlookers to engage in yet another episode of “Things that only happened on the internet, but not in real life”: Vučić “steps down” and “Russia loses another ally [Serbia]”.
Isn’t it lovely that with the advent of social media, so many informed and intelligent people discovered politics three minutes ago, like these two “experts” pictured above.
But it’s not like foreign academia is any better at perceiving what goes on.
The i Paper: “Natia Seskuria, senior research fellow for Russian and Eurasian Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), thinks the loss of this long-term ally is ‘hugely significant’ for Moscow. She said that any shift towards Europe was a ‘big loss’ for under-pressure Putin, following a similar setback when Hungary elected a pro-Europe government earlier this year.“
What Seskuria, like so many others, offered isn’t an analysis, but wishful thinking from an ideological bubble.
Humans of planet Earth: it doesn’t matter what particular office Vučić holds. When he returned to power in 2012, he started out as a deputy prime minister and minister of defence, yet he was calling the shots.
Resignation only makes it easier to time the snap elections. As the chief of a popular far-right/alt-right popular front, he can be a doorman at Nemanjina afterwards, but still in charge.
Seriously, people, get a grip. Planet didn’t start spinning with the arrival of Trump and Putin, and those two didn’t exactly shape much of it, so folks might stop framing everything as some machinations of those two and any event as either detrimental or beneficial for either.
Other countries, Serbia included, have an agency of their own, and dynamics of their own.
Serbianism 