How the Serbian government strengthens its support among the electorate by using physical violence, defamation, lies, and whining.

Aleksandar Vucic and his big-tent coalition have been in power since 2012, and even if they did manage to steer the economy in the right direction (they didn’t), maintain the rule of law, and run the government services efficiently (they don’t), or even have the capacity to act civilly (out of the question), in most societies that have parliamentary and presidential elections they would have most likely overstay their welcome after twelve years in office.

The civil protests were met with organized gangs of thugs sponsored by the state, while many protesters faced judicial prosecution. That’s right – the Serbian government sends hooligans to rough up demonstrators. And the latest addition to the list of methods used against its own people is the nasty habit of “careless drivers” to drive through the protesters. One of the latest such incidents resulted in a 20-year-old female student being hit by a car and ending up in a hospital with a fractured skull.

Prominent opposition figures are victims of consistent smear campaigns aimed at them and their families. A notable case is when Natasa Jeremic, wife of then-opposition presidential candidate Vuk Jeremic, was named as the “head of one of the largest drug cartels in Europe”. Her accuser was Milenko Jovanov, a member of SNS (Serbian People’s Party), a political organization presided over by the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic. Mrs. Jeremic is a TV anchor working for RTS, a Serbian government-owned and funded broadcasting and media company, and the accusations against her were clearly bogus. The result – Aleksandar Vucic won the elections. Such slanders are a dime a dozen, launched daily by the government-affiliated media and public figures.

Dragan Djilas was a businessman, a prominent member of the Democratic Party, and a former mayor of Belgrade, who runs his own political organization now. Dragan Solak is the largest stockholder of Adria Media Group, a media conglomerate operating in Southeastern Europe. This duo has been made a scapegoat for everything that is wrong in Serbia, and the most common accusation against them is that they embezzled obscene amounts of money and moved it to tax havens such as Mauritius. The state propaganda machinery hasn’t managed to put its finger on the exact imaginary amount of stolen money yet, and it is somewhere between 620 million USD and 20-30 billion USD. The only evidence of this imaginary colossal robbery was a piece in Vecernje Novosti, a state-owned newspaper, that claimed their investigative journalist got the information about the dastardly duo’s secret bank account through a telephone call with a bank manager in Mauritius.

Just before the WHO declared the COVID-19 pandemic, Vucic took the floor, accompanied by Dr. Branimir Nestorovic, a prominent Serbian pulmonologist and an even more prominent quack known for his outlandish claims that go against accepted medical knowledge, who declared that COVID-19 is the funniest virus ever and we can soon go shopping in Milan.

When photographs featuring the president’s son keeping company with known local gangsters surfaced, Vucic started a witch-hunt against “the people who hate his family and want them dead”.

Ever since Milosevic was in power, and Vucic started his political career in 1992, as a member of the Serbian Radical Party of Vojislav Seselj, a siege mentality shrouding Serbia was carefully cultivated with massive brainwashing of the general populace with stories that the Serbian population is in an ever-present danger from foreign and domestic enemies. This successfully whipped up a warlike frenzy for the Yugoslav wars that lasted from 1991. to 1999. and served as an excuse for the economic disaster, lawlessness, and misery of that period.

A recent string of disastrous industrial accidents was dismissed by Vucic as suspicious acts of sabotage at first, then he tried shifting the blame to party-appointed managers of those companies, and now it’s down to arresting journalists who investigate such disasters.

Whatever problem arises, Vucic doesn’t solve it, but throws a hissy fit, and directs the anger of the public to haters, busybodies, foreign conspiracies, the fifth column, the Russo-Ukrainian war, terrible alignment of the stars, or whatever. Nothing is his fault.

And just like any paternalist authoritarian, Vucic has terrible leadership skills because he doesn’t know the Golden Rule of leadership – everything is the leader’s fault. The omniscient Dear President is in charge of everything since there are no legislative boundaries for him, no parliamentary oversight, no autonomy for government ministers, and no independence of the courts and prosecutors. So no matter how much he stomps his foot, the terrible shape of this country is always the Supreme Commander’s responsibility.

But all this doesn’t concern his voting base. To them, such behavior is considered assertive and irreverent, a mark of a strong leader who speaks truth to power and cares about traditional values like Family and Nationhood.

The popular, omnipresent slogan from the placard above illustrates the success of Vucic’s smear campaigns against moderate Serbian opposition parties. The meaning of the phrase “For these to leave, for those not to come back” is that the opponents of Vucic want him out, but don’t want any of the parties and politicians from the period that spanned 2001 to 2012, when Serbia was run mostly by parties that toppled Milosevic and initiated economic growth, democratization, started combating organized crime and, in the minds of the Serbian general population their greatest sin of all, extradited people wanted accused of war crimes to the Hague Tribunal. Serbian Mr. and Mrs. Average hate the local pro-European movements just as much as they are wary of SNS’s incompetence, cronyism, and corruption.