In Belgrade, the morning after the night before, the city is serene. The roads have been fastidiously cleared of the banners and debris. The violence exists now only on social media, and in the collective consciousness. All the while, the government does its best to ignore the chaos — but the people refuse to forget.
Serbia’s protests began back in November 2024, after the concrete canopy of the Novi Sad train station collapsed, killing 16 people. The people were quick to blame the disaster on government corruption and incompetence. The station’s canopy, after all, had recently been renovated by Chinese engineers. And though the authorities insist the project was “up to European standards”, no one believes that, especially when the relevant documents remain classified.
Yet if Novi Sad was the trigger, the longevity of Serbia’s protests imply a deeper and broader malaise. Over the last nine months, they’ve morphed from anger over a single issue to a general movement for change, one encompassing the country’s very civic identity. At the centre of it all is President Aleksandar Vučić, who over the last decade has morphed from a far-Right nationalist to a supposedly pragmatic pro-EU figure. Along the way, he has come to epitomise two things: both the long-standing ambiguity of Serbia’s geopolitical position, and a broader continent-wide slide towards populist autocracy.
In a sense, Vučić’s very person is ambiguous. A man of relentless will and fertile intelligence, he is also famed for his oddly feminine lips (one of his nicknames is “pussy lips”). He has been in power for 12 years, circumventing the constitutional term limit by “doing a Putin” and switching between being president and prime minister. Those on the streets have had enough — and many blame Vučić personally. “He’s been in power for so long now, that for many of the protestors that is like a half of their lives,” says Marija, a young professional who has attended several protests.
Among other things, Marija accuses Vučić of hollowing out state institutions, instead framing national life around his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Just as bad, she adds, is the fallout of the Novi Sad disaster. Apart from those still-unclassified files, she notes that only Serbs have yet been charged for the collapse. “It’s final proof for many not just of the cost of corruption but also the protection of foreign investors.” Other young demonstrators have similar complaints. “We want early elections, the reintroduction of democratic norms, an end of mass corruption,” says Stefan, an IT consultant. “We just want the chance to improve our lives.” Fair enough: with inflation around 5%, the cost of food and utilities rising, life here is getting tougher.
All this helps explain why, close to a year on, the protests are still going strong. As I walked through central Belgrade over the weekend, it was impossible to avoid the anti-government chatter after yet another demonstration. If, however, the anti-Vučić crowds are resolute, tensions have been rising. For eight months, things remained largely peaceful. But then, in June, police arrested hundreds of demonstrators, spurring their comrades to blockade roads. That, in turn, prompted the government to flood the streets with counter-demonstrators. Now, both sides are doubling down. Last week, anti-government protesters set the offices of the SNS on fire during a fifth consecutive night of protests.
The police responded with now-customary brutality in Belgrade and Novi Sad. In the city of Valjevo, they used stun grenades and tear gas on protestors. Dozens have since been injured in clashes, with hundreds more detained. According to one young activist named Milos, by now a veteran protester and talking to UnHerd using a pseudonym, the police are “brutal”, adding that they protect gangs of paid thugs to attack demonstrators. For his part, Vučić has said, with the type of prophylactic language beloved by dictators, that the government will not “remain unresponsive”.
It is, though, under pressure. SNS support has steadily eroded. According to a July poll, 54.8% now support the “student list” — an anti-government coalition, as the name suggests partly composed of the middle classes — compared to the 42.1% sticking to Vučić. But in the rural areas, and among the elderly, government support remains huge. The country, then, is polarised, even as some retired people are now coming out in support of the students, joined by less-educated Serbs tired of seeing their living standards drop. The President’s term ends in 2027, and he’s promised to step down then, hoping to mollify the public. But no one buys this; he’s said it too many times before.
All the while, the protests have brought out an increasingly autocratic strain in the President — and not just on the streets. The government now regularly accuses NGOs of plotting to destabilise the country with foreign funding. Serbian media is also less than free. Several pro-Vučić advertising agencies flood TV networks with overwhelmingly pro-government narratives. A 2022 study found Vučić received 44 hours of airtime over three months, 87% of it positive; the opposition got a mere three hours, and most of that was negative.
What has irked many young people I speak to here is that Serbia has been a candidate for EU accession since 2014. From then until 2020, the country received €1.1 billion a year from Brussels. In 2023 alone, it was responsible for 59.7% of Serbia’s total trade in goods. The EU, then, clearly has leverage over Serbia. But despite the protesters’ demands for security service reforms aligning closely with EU values, Brussels has said little about the upheaval, and almost nothing about the government crackdown.
No wonder many anti-government activists I met in Belgrade feel let down. There were noticeably few EU flags at the protests I attended. And while EU accession is not an official anti-government demand, it’s clear that people here were hoping for more from Brussels. “The EU betrayed those who believed in its values,” says Milos. “I believe government violence will increase. If so, we expect even greater resistance from citizens and more concrete support from other countries, and the European Union.”
I fear he will be disappointed. As Balkans analyst Tim Judah observes, the EU sees Serbia as one of Europe’s “stabilitocracies”, regimes that supposedly secure stability, pretend to espouse EU integration, but then engage in various insalubrious practices that undermine democracy and the rule of law. Vučić acts in increasingly authoritarian ways with limited pushback because he has so many avenues of leverage against the EU and the broader West.
As Judah explains, that begins with history. Though the wars of the Nineties feel distant now, Eurocrats still fear that latent ethnic tensions across the region could resurface. Certainly, memories are very much alive here in Belgrade. “The only genocide in the Balkans was against the Serbs” bawls white spray paint wrapped around a corner building in the city centre, a reference to Croatian atrocities during the Second World War. Nearby, a former government building remains a deliberate ruin. It was bombed by Nato in 1999, and now stands as a monument to Western iniquity —though there have been attempts to turn it into a Trump Tower.
Vučić is also well-placed to play regional spoiler if he wants. An ally of ethnic Serbian leaders in Bosnia and Kosovo, he can easily encourage secessionist demands beyond his borders. As Serbia’s domestic crisis deepens, a Vučić who decides to stoke conflict across the Balkans to divert his people’s attention from internal problems could easily spark a toxic geopolitical conflagration.
Vučić’s leverage lies not just with the EU, but the West more broadly. Most immediately, and with the encouragement of both Brussels and DC, Serbia has been a huge arms exporter to Ukraine. From February 2022 to June 2024 alone, it exported $800 million worth of ammunition to Kyiv (which uses the same Soviet calibre stock), albeit via third parties. This is shadowed by other arms shipments, including artillery rockets and tank rounds. The US was also happy to see Belgrade to supply arms to Israel: it exported €42 million worth of arms to the Jewish state in 2024, a 30-fold jump from 2023.
Meanwhile, Rio Tinto, a British-Australian firm, is currently building a massive lithium mine in Serbia’s Jadar Valley. Set to be Europe’s largest, once completed it will fulfil 90% of Europe’s lithium needs, securing urgently needed supply chains for electric vehicles. Given the knife fight with China for rare earths, Brussels sees the project as having enormous strategic value. No less important, it needs Vučić to shepherd the scheme through in the face of huge domestic opposition: thanks to environmental concerns and the mine’s disruption to farmland. So if its policy toward the protests is unarticulated, it is clear: lie back and think of the lithium.
Vučić happily accepts Europe’s riches and frames EU accession as a goal, while he also makes friends elsewhere. China, so central to the Novi Sad station debacle, is a case in point. In November 2023, Belgrade signed a free trade deal with Beijing, the first of its kind in the region. Though Vučić claims the deal will lapse upon EU accession, if and when that happens, it almost certainly won’t. After all, China has also invested $10 billion in Serbia through the Belt and Road Initiative, mainly in infrastructure, and sent PPE and medical experts during the Covid crisis. “European solidarity does not exist,” Vučić declared at the time. “Serbia now turns its eyes to China.”
And if that again explains Vučić’s marked reluctance to investigate China’s role in the Novi Sad saga, Russia, too, enjoys a special role in Serbia. Belgrade imports its energy from there, while it also exports ammunition to Putin’s war machine via third parties, the mirror of its support for Ukraine. Vučić celebrates Victory Day in Moscow while the Kremlin says anti-government protests are Western-backed attempts at a colour revolution — even as Serbia’s subtle diplomatic dance continues. The EU, after all, remains its leading investment partner, with Serbs enjoying visa-free travel to the bloc.
Vučić’s strategy of leveraging East and West to maximise benefits for Serbia is, Judah argues, “embedded in the political DNA of Serbs.” It’s most fully exemplified in the figure of former Yugoslav leader Marshall Josip Broz Tito, who rooted his nation’s foreign policy in non-alignment, taking what he could get from all sides. When Tito took power in Yugoslavia, in 1945, he modelled much of his state on Soviet lines. The USSR supplied huge amounts of economic and military aid to its fellow socialist country, while Tito sent his officers to train in Moscow. At the same time, though, he was happy to receive arms from the US, which opened the door to military and economic aid from the West. In 1953, Tito even joined a military pact with soon-to-be Nato members Greece and Turkey, giving Yugoslavia effective access to the bloc without actually joining.
Serbia remains as non-aligned now as it was then, with Serbian officials boasting that their nation is ‘“the east of the West” and the “west of the East”. Given that modern-day Serbia lacks the size and resources of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Vučić must be even more adept at embracing the role and grabbing what he can. And with Brussels fatigued by enlargement negotiations with 10 countries, to say nothing of its epic problems from migration to energy, Vučić can be confident he won’t face much pushback.
This, in the end, is the problem with the EU: it’s a supranational organisation that speaks of its devotion to “universal” values, while its mandate is to quasi-govern a series of interlocking states with their own ethnic, political and historical narratives. Brussels must always balance a multiplicity of competing national interests if the train is to keep moving. And if this is clear enough in Belgrade, something similar is playing out elsewhere in Europe.
In December 2024, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico met with Putin in Moscow; Hungary’s Viktor Orbán made a similar visit in July. Both countries have curtailed free speech and clamped down on political opposition. Fico is now working to dismantle judicial independence and undermine anti-corruption efforts. The result, like in Serbia, is internal unrest. From January to March 2024, Slovakia saw over 150 protests, including one in February when 110,000 people took to the streets. This then provokes more autocratic behaviour, which the EU must duly ignore. And, like in Serbia, Brussels knows it cannot allow these countries to choose an anti-Western path.
As for Serbia itself, the protests continue, and the country’s future remains unclear. Should the protestors’ demands be met, Serbia will face snap elections and significant government reforms, accompanied by an acceleration of EU integration. This scenario is, however, plausible only if the students manage to appease the varied factions that support them. Fail and the country will enter a period of political instability: an inevitable consequence of a fragmented opposition, ongoing economic disruptions, and a potential backlash from pro-government forces. Should this happen, Vučić would likely return to power, especially as he probably remains the only Serbian politician capable of navigating the country through its current turmoil.
All the while, the unrest continues. One recent afternoon, as I walk through Belgrade surveying the mess from yet another protest, I notice a rubbish bin in which someone has dumped a sign. “Revolucija”, it says simply, defiance amid the detritus.
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Author: David Patrikarakos
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