Garvan Walshe: Rattled Vučić wants to silence a British-owned independent Serbian TV station

Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party.

Aleksandar Vučić is rattled.

Nine months of growing and angry protests have shaken his regime of fake democracy. 

As he and his friends monopolised the media, purged the civil service, and helped themselves to cheap Russian energy, kickbacks on Chinese-funded infrastructure projects, the West had chosen to look away.  Unlike other populist leaders, Vučić didn’t berate them, he made himself useful, by sending ammunition to Ukraine.

He promoted traditional homophobia while appointing an openly Lesbian Prime Minister, Anna Brnabic. He tolerated Kosovo’s independence, even as the intransigent Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti heightened tensions, while at the same time tolerating incendiary and corrupt Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik. He praised the EU and affected enthusiasm for its enlargement process, while ensuring Serbia failed to meet the democracy criteria required for entry. 

Janus would have been proud.

If the West tired of this two-faced policy, he would hint, he could always defect fully to Moscow’s and Beijing’s side.

On Wednesday he took the unusual step of writing to the FT, which had earlier in the week published a leader attacking him, in an attempt to keep the West on side.

The proximate cause of the attacks was attempting to violently suppress the latest round of street protests in Belgrade and several other cities. These have now reached the point where his legitimacy has evaporated and his ability to keep order is being called into question.

The protests began after a train station canopy in Serbia’s second city of Novi Sad collapsed killing 16 people.

They have been led by students, rather than the normal opposition parties, and their demands widened from addressing the corruption that meant the canopy wasn’t properly constructed towards the system that presided over that corruption. Protesters now want elections, and have formed a list to contest him. Showing plenty of brass neck, Vučić told the FT it wasn’t time for snap elections, even though Vučić himself dissolved the Serbian parliament before its term was up in 2022 and 2023  because he was sure of winning.

This protest movement is the strongest challenge to authoritarian rule in Serbia since the protests that overthrew Vucic’s former boss, Slobodan Milosevic, in 2000, and the regime is floundering in its response. It tried ignoring the protests, but they continued. It attempted to organise counter-protests, but few people turned up to them. It has tried repression (it denied using a sonic weapon to disperse protesters, only to undermine its credibility by inviting investigators from Russia’s FSB security service to confirm the denial) but that is backfiring.

As it flounders, it has resorted to an old tactic: seeking control of the media. Belgrade has been dialling up the pressure on United Media, which owns the N1 TV station, the last major broadcaster independent of government interference. United is owned by the British Private Equity firm BP Partners, which is thought to be looking to sell the station, as Vučić’s repression is hitting its profitability.

Though this is not the 1990s, and what is left of the international community lacks the bandwidth to focus intently on Belgrade has it had then, the time has come to help Vučić understand that if he doesn’t leave office the only option available would be attempt such violence that it would return Serbia to the pariah status it had under his former boss.  Nor are Serbs are likely to tolerate a return to isolation.

Serbs are divided about their alignment with the West. Many still resent NATO for its bombardment in the Kosovo war. Vučić’s allies have tried to stoke these feelings, and provoke division in the protest movement over issues like Srebrenica or the official recognition of Kosovo. It is a sign of the movement’s determination and maturity that it has avoided this trap, by emphasising their grievance is with Serbia’s current government, not events three decades ago.

Indeed, the presence of nationalist Serbs among the protests had made it impossible for Vučić to present the uprising as the work of internationally minded elites.

In fact, Serbs of all political persuasions have had enough of his kleptocratic rule.

People often used to shrug, when reminded of his corruption, that “at least he builds things”, but once the things he built fell down and killed people, their mood soured, building on anger in 2023 over a US-style school shooting at a primary school.

Vučić would be well advised to start negotiating a transition, so he doesn’t have to ask his FSB friends to spirit him away to share a (ground-floor?) Moscow flat with the Assads and Viktor Yanukovich.

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