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A blood-red handprint is the calling card of anti-government protesters in Serbia who are staging some of the largest student-led demonstrations in Europe since the French événements of 1968. While hard-right threats to liberal democracy are often the focus of Europe’s attention, the young Serbian protesters are showing that strongman regimes resented as corrupt, incompetent and repressive are vulnerable, too.
The unrest began in November when 15 people were killed in the city of Novi Sad after the collapse of a concrete canopy over a railway station. They have spread to more than 150 cities, towns and villages, making them the biggest in Serbia since mass protests toppled the late autocrat Slobodan Milošević in 2000. Last week, Miloš Vučević, Serbia’s prime minister, bowed to public pressure and resigned.
Similar protests are gathering steam in Slovakia, where crowds have turned out to denounce the illiberal prime minister Robert Fico. In the Balkans, the Serbian unrest recalls anti-corruption rallies that swept Bulgaria in 2013.
The common theme is a yearning for justice, accountability and freedom of expression. Such liberal values are supposed to typify western European democracies. They remain a beacon for many people in parts of central and eastern Europe where the democratic promise of the 1989 revolutions has fallen short of expectations.
The fall of Vučević seems unlikely to satisfy Serbia’s protesters. No Serb is under illusions about who really runs things. It is Aleksandar Vučić who has ruled the roost since 2014, first as prime minister, then as president. The demonstrators dismiss Vučić’s hint that he might call snap parliamentary elections. Such contests are invariably held in conditions favouring his ruling party. The legislature is in any case largely a rubber-stamp body.
Serbia’s protesters face awkward choices if they are to sustain their momentum. They seem able to count on public backing: a poll in December suggested that 61 per cent of Serbs supported them. But the students want little to do with official opposition parties, regarding them as tainted by involvement in a rotten political system.
At the same time, the students have deliberately not chosen anyone to lead them. There is no Serbian Lech Wałęsa, chair of Poland’s Solidarity movement in the 1980s, and no Serbian Václav Havel, the Czech dissident intellectual of that era. If they want to see the back of Vučić, the protesters may have to set aside their misgivings, co-operate with opposition parties and find a credible alternative as president.
In Vučić’s favour is his control of levers of state power such as the security police, judiciary and media. Much of society depends on his Serbian Progressive party, which is less a political movement than a patronage machine that distributes jobs and perks.
However, the students’ campaign has strengths, too. One is that most demonstrators are young enough to have known no Serbian ruler except Vučić. The thirst for change is fierce. Another is their willingness to appeal to people’s patriotism by massing under the Serbian national flag. The students feel none of the shame of older liberal Serbs, who remember it was under this flag that Milošević committed atrocities in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
EU leaders seem conspicuously silent about the protests. Is this because the bloc signed an accord with Vučić last year to use Serbia’s lithium for electric vehicle batteries? Many oppose the deal on environmental grounds.
Those who have voiced support for the students include Novak Djokovic, the Serbian-born tennis star, and Madonna, the American singer. It seems pusillanimous of the EU not to follow suit when it purports to defend exactly the values in Ukraine that young Serbs wish to see upheld in their country.
tony.barber@ft.com
