Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić faces the most challenging few weeks of his political career, with two deadlines that have the potential to seal his pro-Moscow regime’s fate.
Anger at the strongman’s de facto 13-year rule has already sparked the most significant demonstration in Serbia for a generation, with hundreds of thousands of people flooding Belgrade last month as a student-led movement gathered momentum and temporarily shut down much of the economy.
Vučić had sacked his prime minister weeks earlier in an attempt to blunt the protesters’ complaints of government corruption and mismanagement, and under Serbian law he has until April 18 to appoint a successor or call a snap vote.
Neither scenario will satisfy the broadening protest movement, say analysts, as the demonstrators distrust Vučić and his appointees and they have little faith that any election would be free and fair.
Vučić also has until the end of the month to find a buyer for the Russian stake in Serbia’s only oil refinery or face US sanctions that would probably cut off fuel imports.
Srdjan Cvijic, a strategist at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy think-tank, said it was hard to see a path forward for a leader who has in effect ruled the Balkan nation since 2012.
“It’s definitely the beginning of the end for Vučić. The only question is how it will play out,” he said.
Milos Damnjanovic, an analyst at the Birn consultancy in Belgrade, said Vučić had “underestimated the depth of anger” of the protesters and had sought to “dodge responsibility” for the catalogue of failures that led teachers, lawyers, farmers and others to flock to what began as a campus blockade.
The demonstrations echo those that ended Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milošević’s regime 25 years ago. Vučić served as propaganda minister to Milošević, who was later indicted for war crimes.
The spark for the new wave of protests was the deaths of 16 people in November when a train station roof collapsed in the city of Novi Sad. The terminal had been renovated under China’s Belt and Road Initiative, leading to accusations that people close to the president profited from the contract. Vučić has denied culpability but has yet to fully open the files on the incident.
The Serbian leader has vowed to face down the protesters he accused of acting “like gods”, saying their actions did not reflect true public opinion.
“If you ask me whether the country is heading in the right direction, my response would be — for the short term — the wrong direction,” he told the Financial Times in Belgrade last week. He also vowed to “take my country out of this havoc . . . organised from outside, and also organised by all political opponents and the NGOs in this country.”
Yet an internal opinion poll for the government whose results were shared with the FT suggests he has badly misjudged the popular mood, showing a sharp fall in support for Vučić and his ruling SNS party. The same poll shows the students are backed by 58 per cent of Serbs, and its conclusions called the protests “a game-changer”.
Dragan Bjelogrlić, an actor who is one of the protest leaders, said Vučić had been squeezed into a lose-lose position, where to admit the truth behind the Novi Sad incident risked revealing his system’s dark underbelly. Protesters have demanded all relevant documents be published.
“If he rejects the demands, the protests continue and he will fall. If he fulfils them, his mafia is exposed and he will fall. It’s time to finish what was started in the 1990s,” Bjelogrlić said, referring to the protests who ousted Milošević.
One small positive for Vučić is the lack of a challenger inside his own party and the absence of an obvious leader from among the opposition to galvanise the protest movement and challenge him at the ballot box.
Savo Manojlović, a lawyer who came to the fore during 2022 protests against a lithium mine that forced Vučić to back down, is one of those seeking to bridge the gap between protesters and politicians. He argues that the regime’s opponents must join forces to effect real change.
“The answer is one big movement,” he said. “People are mobilised spontaneously, so they need to be organised, they need structure.” His Kreni Promeni (Go Change) movement has just over 10 per cent support in the polls.
Even if Vučić does succeed in finding a prime minister to lead a new government and preserve his regime, it will offer only limited breathing space before the next deadline.
While the US has already twice extended the deadline for Serbia to find a buyer for the NIS refinery stake held by Gazprom and its subsidiary or face sanctions, the Russian company is not willing to sell in the first place.
“The Russian attitude is that they want to keep it at any price,” Vučić said.
“Sanctions — with international banks aligning with them — are not an option for Serbia,” said Darko Obradović, programme director of the Centre for Strategic Analysis, a Belgrade think-tank. “They would destroy the economy.”
