Socialist Party of Serbia (Slobodan Milošević’s party) expelled a senior member, Branko Ružić, and he’s already being hailed as “decent and uncorrupt” by the opposition commentariat, going as far as to name him “A Serbian Peter Magyar“, because nothing says “decent and uncorrupt” like being a member of a party that ushered in the ethno-nationalist Yugoslav wars.
It’s how the student movement whitewashed a bunch of people who were members of the Serbian Radical Party (their leader Vojislav Šešelj was convicted before the ICTY), like Nemanja Šarović and Ivan Ninić, among others. They were members of the SRS so they could “fight corruption“, ya know.
The anti-corruption demagogy (“drain the swamp” nonsense sloganism) is a common trait all over the world, but in Serbia it has a very sinister twist: parties promoting extremist nationalism, like Socialists and Radicals (who later mutated into the ruling Progressives) were considered uncorrupt because they just killed a bunch of folks of the “wrong” ethnicity and a few “bad” Serbs, but they would, like NEVER EVER embezzle money, pinky swear. The electorate here believes in such an idiotic notion: in the minds of the Serbian people, mass robbery started after the Milošević era, which is BS.
The Yogurt Revolution (Anti-bureaucratic revolution) of 1988-89, which solidified Milošević’s power, was a campaign of protests in Serbia to “purge corrupt officials” and “protect the rights of the endangered Serbian people in Kosovo”. Sounds familiar? Serbia is “Groundhog Day” with mass graves and turbo-folk music.
So what followed after the Yogurt Revolution, apart from wars? The economic transition, of course. The first change of ownership from state and social ownership started alongside the political transition into multipartism, creating our own class of oligarchs in the 1990s – we call them tycoons.
The Socialist Party of Serbia, which declared itself the sole heir of the old communist party, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ), and its affiliated organizations, took over SKJ’s real estate property, making them insta-rich.
A good deal of the Serbian opposition vox populi is less than enthusiastic about comrade Ružić.
Serbianism 