Serbia has been racked for months by disruptive protests largely attributed to students, opposition leaders and university authorities. Are these organic protests?
Anti-government protest in Belgrade, Slavija Square, Dec. 22, 2024. (Stefan Miljuš /Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
By Diana Johnstone
Special to Consortium News
Serbia is a small country which used to be a favorite of Western Allied powers like France and Britain for its heroic resistance to Austrian and German invasion in two world wars.
They liked it so much that in redrawing European boundaries at Versailles in 1918, they enlarged it into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes which later became Yugoslavia.
Some Serb leaders at the time felt that this was too much, but at the time, Croat and Slovene leaders were glad to leave the Austro-Hungarian Empire and join the winning side.
All this changed abruptly in the 1990s. Germany had been reunited and began to drop its humble post-World War II foreign policy. With German support and encouragement, the Yugoslav republics (states) of Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, with the intention of joining the club of the rich: the European Union.
This shift enabled the two richest Yugoslav states to stop paying development funds for poorer regions such as Kosovo and to receive development funds from the EU. The debt crisis of the 1970s had strained relations among the republics.
But according to the secessionists, their sole motivation was to escape from “Serbian nationalism.” A great champion of this interpretation was the late Otto von Habsburg, an influential member of the European Parliament. As heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, dismantled as a result of World War I, he naturally held a personal grudge against Serbia.
As the Yugoslav disintegration grew confused and violent, Western media and government enthusiastically echoed the Habsburg line, not as such, but as defense of Western values and self-determination.
Western media put all the blame for everything on the Serbs, evoking the inevitable Hitler analogy to describe Serbia’s besieged leader, Slobodan Milosevic, as a “dictator” and to liken his failing efforts to keep Yugoslavia together with the Third Reich’s massive invasion of the rest of Europe.
“Heroic little Serbia” was transformed into the Pariah of the Western World.
A Nation in Limbo
The concrete result of the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia was to transform the “defensive” alliance into an aggressive force; to deliver the historic Serbian province of Kosovo to armed ethnic Albanians; and to build an enormous U.S. military base in the province.
But NATO nations framed it as conspiratorial to say that such were the aims of the NATO bombing. No, the official purpose was “the right to intervene” on grounds of human rights, to “save the Kosovars” from a “genocide” that was never a real possibility. That’s what everyone in the West has been told, over and over.
NATOland and “Western values” do not — not any longer — dominate the whole world. But Serbia is situated, geographically and psychologically, in the West.
Serbia was part of Yugoslavia, an independent, nonaligned socialist country, not part of the Soviet bloc. But Serbs have an historic friendship with Russia, as fellow Orthodox Christians, dating back to Serbia’s struggle to free itself from the Ottoman Empire. Serbs are in fact torn between, or attached to, both East and West.
They are in a perfect situation to be friends with everyone, which is what the current government in Belgrade of President Alexander Vucic is trying to do.
From its history and natural inclinations, Serbia should be a bridge between East and West.
Vucic with journalists during the 2018 European People’s Party Congress in Helsinki. (European People’s Party /Wikimedia Commons /CC BY 2.0)
Vucic was elected president of Serbia in 2017 and he and his Serbian Progressive Party have won a number of elections since by wide majorities. His economic development policies have made a bad situation better.
After Western companies took over Serbian industries only to shut them down, Vucic has welcomed Chinese investments which are reviving Serbian industrial production and mining. The economic growth rate accelerated to a comfortable 3.9 percent in 2024. Higher education for students who pass entrance exams is free, and Serbian universities enjoy high international ratings.
In contrast to its neighbors, Serbs are staying in their native land, while others are leaving. (Bosnia Herzegovina has lost half of its population to emigration, relatively prosperous Montenegro 24.4 percent, North Macedonia 31.6 percent and Serbia only 7 percent, indicating that life prospects there are relatively promising.)
Serbia’s relations with China have long been friendly and profitable. Vucic’s foreign policy tries to balance between East and West, but the rise in hostility between the EU and Russia makes this difficult.
But the same Western supremacists who destroyed the natural “bridge” function of Ukraine by insisting on its “NATO destiny” are working to subvert all potential bridges to Russia — distant Georgia, Moldova and nearby Serbia.
As an applicant to join the European Union, Serbia is kept under constant observation to see whether it is adapting to EU standards, economic and political. To satisfy Brussels, Vucic has supplied weapons to Ukraine but refuses to enforce sanctions against Russia, which provides Serbia with gas.
He has rejected EU demands to recognize the independence of Kosovo, as any Serbian leader must do to remain in office until tomorrow. But his domestic critics consider him not tough enough.
EU Parliament on Jan. 19, 2011, the day members approved a reform package, the EU-Serbia Stabilisation and Association Agreement, designed to move the country toward EU membership. (European Parliament/Flickr/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Vucic defied EU threats by flying to Moscow to attend the May 9 ceremonies celebrating the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany’s war of conquest. Otherwise, he would have been hotly condemned at home for slavish subservience to the EU. Instead, his enemies can cry “Putin’s puppet.”
Josip Tito’s policy of nonalignment was a great success and Vucic appears to emulate the former Yugoslavian leader’s approach. But his balancing act exposes him to criticism from both sides.
Protests Against…Whatever
Strangely, for months Serbia has been rocked by massive student protests and blockades, not over foreign policy or over any specific government policies, but primarily in response to tragic events with no obvious political significance.
In Belgrade on May 3, 2023, a 13-year-old boy armed with pistols and Molotov cocktails attacked his school, killing eight children and a security guard. The under-age shooter was eventually sent to a psychiatric hospital and the parents were charged.
On the evening of the very next day a 20-year-old man drove through two villages in central Serbia firing an automatic assault rifle, killing nine people and wounding 12 others. He fled but was caught and eventually sentenced to 20 years.
This was shocking in a country where gun ownership is high but shooting incidents rare. Large protest demonstrations were held in major cities for several months. Opposition leaders created a protest movement “Serbia Against Violence” which blamed Vucic for creating “an atmosphere” responsible for the killings.
This is surely an exaggeration. In fact, police repression in Serbia is relatively mild, and Vucic can hardly be blamed for the mood of violence that prevails in the world today. Former Prime Minister Ana Brnabic also risked exaggeration by claiming that the protests were “fueled by foreign intelligence services.”
Candidates for “Serbia Against Violence” won 24 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections on Dec. 17, 2023, just half the 48 percent won by the coalition supported by Vucic.
Serbia Against Violence, or SPN, coalition representatives in front of the National Assembly of Serbia on Nov. 3, 2023. (Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 3.0)
In February 2024, a delegation headed by Marinika Tepic of “Serbia Against Violence” and Radomir Lazovic of the “Serbian Green-Left Front” went to Strasbourg to complain to the European Parliament that the elections had been stolen.
Enjoying minimal legislative power, the European Parliament asserts itself mainly by adopting virtuous resolutions condemning human rights violations in foreign countries on the basis of often unverified complaints.
As was to be expected, by an overwhelming vote of 461 to 52 the European Parliament promptly adopted a strong resolution calling for an international investigation into “election irregularities” and threatening to stop EU funding. The main complaint was that by campaigning, President Vucic had unfairly influenced voters.
Marinika Tepic declared to Politico that “if something doesn’t change now, we will completely slide into a dictatorship.”
EU’s Missionary Work
Protests against recognizing the December 2023 elections reached such proportions that many feared a replay of the 2014 Maidan demonstrations that led to war in Ukraine.
Pavle Cicvaric, who had learned organizing skills in numerous programs and workshops funded by Western foundations, led the student protests in Belgrade. The young leader’s parents are both deeply involved in the work of NGOs.
His mother, Dr. Jelena Žunic Cicvaric, is project coordinator of the NGO “Regional EU Resource Center for Civil Society in Serbia,” a key channel for the redistribution of European Union funds, allocated only to those actively working on raising awareness of “European values.”
His father, Radovan Cicvaric, a long-time politician campaigning for Euro-integration, is also promoting “European values” as director of the NGO Užice Center for Child Rights (UCPD) founded in 1998.
While the UCPD focuses on children, another influential NGO, the Belgrade Open School (BOS), founded in 1993, sponsors programs for students and young professionals, including “training of social change agents.”
Both are part of the “Youth Umbrella Organization of Serbia” which receives significant funds from international donors such as USAID, the Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and various European Union programs.
They organize workshops, training sessions, and projects aimed at strengthening the capacities of local NGOs and promoting European values. “Transition” countries applying for EU membership must listen to instructions on how to be worthy Europeans.
This educational task is undertaken by the European Fund for the Balkans (EFB), a joint initiative of European foundations that envisions, runs and supports initiatives aimed at strengthening democracy and fostering European integration.
Significantly, the EFB is sponsoring a “Joint History Project” to produce and spread a unified version of regional history, with the kind support of the German Foreign Office.
The Balkan Trust for Democracy (BTD) is a foundation based in Belgrade. It was founded in March 2003 by the German Marshall Fund, USAID, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Other donors include the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Tipping Point Foundation, Robert Bosch Foundation, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and the foreign affairs ministries of Denmark and Greece. The BTD supports grant donation, policy dialogue, and leadership development.
If you want to be a leader, you know where to go.
It is hard to imagine that these Western-financed organizations have not contributed to the zeal and skill of Serbian student protesters.
A Deadly Collapse
Novi Sad is Serbia’s second-largest city, a major stop on the new high speed railway route between Belgrade and Budapest being rebuilt with Chinese aid.
As part of this project, Novi Sad’s 60-year old modernistic railroad station was recently renovated, leaving in place a long concrete canopy across its entrance side. On the morning of Nov. 1, 2024, the concrete canopy suddenly collapsed, killing a total of 16 people.
The Serbian government declared a nation-wide day of mourning, a number of officials resigned, including the Serbian construction minister and the mayor of Novi Sad. Investigations of the causes are continuing.
Portion of the canopy of the main railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia, that collapsed onto people walking and sitting underneath on Nov. 1, 2024. (Mishyac /Wikimedia Commons/ CC0)
For the student activists, the collapse was seen as clear proof of corruption, not only in construction work on the station but throughout society. Declaring that what happened in Novi Sad is proof that Serbia is overwhelmed by crime, violence, corruption and despair, the students have given themselves the task of changing this “unbearable social reality” to build a new Serbia.
An apparently leaderless movement organizes student plenums which privately decide by consensus what to do next. They have shut down university faculties and schools, preventing students from attending classes for months.
Students who want to attend classes are treated like traitors. Even hospitals have been blockaded. It has been observed that the activist students tend to come from well-to-do families and are not joined by working class youth. It is an elite revolt calling for equality.
Students blocking traffic are protected by police. The government clearly suspects provocation and has been avoiding the sort of violent repression used by the French government of Emmanuel Macron to put down the Yellow Vests movement.
Transition to What?
March during the general strike in Belgrade on Jan, 24, 2025. The banner in the foreground says “Only Student Save the Serbs,” a play on the national slogan “Only Unity Saves the Serbs.” (SergioOren / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)
Serbian students under 26 were not born when NATO bombed Serbia.
Serbian youth has grown up torn between the scars of the NATO bombing and the persistent dominant Western view of Serbs as the guilty party for the destruction of Yugoslavia. No wonder that this creates some confusion.
It is understandable that a portion of middle class Serbian, urban youth find it unbearable to be excluded from “the West” by Serbia’s imposed Pariah status.
Youth can be very conformist in their rebelliousness, seeking to join together in defiance of their elders. However confused the West may be, it still excels most in selling itself as something marvelous.
A significant way it does this is through its massive web of non-governmental organizations.
In April, EU auditors issued a report noting a “lack of transparency” in granting some 4.8 billion euros to some 5,000 NGOs during the 2021-2023 period, in addition to Member State grants of some 2.6 billion euros to around 7,500 NGOs from EU funding sources.
It is not clear which countries benefited, but Marta Kos, the Slovenian EU commissioner for enlargement, has mentioned Serbia.
Kos during confirmation hearings as European commissioner for enlargement, Nov. 7, 2024. (CC-BY-4.0: © European Union 2024– Source: EP)
In a March 28 interview with Slovenian RTV, Kos rejected as “unacceptable” suggestions by President Vucic that EU-funded NGOs are encouraging student protests aimed to overthrow him. Kos nevertheless noted that she was “much more in contact with the NGOs I met in Brussels than with the Serbian government or its president.”
She said:
“Many NGOs in Serbia would not survive without our support, and it is precisely because of the exceptional importance of NGOs that I have decided to allocate an additional €16 million to them for the period from this year until the end of 2027.”
“Without the participation of civil society, there can be no enlargement process,” Kos said, adding that she trusts the Serbian people to “guide their politicians so that Serbia can become a member of the European Union.” Kos feels qualified to provide guidance.
Aleksander Vulin is a prominent Socialist who has held various ministerial posts. But no more. “I hope that Mr. Vulin will not be a member of the new government, because those who act in an anti-European manner cannot lead Serbia into the EU,” said Kos. She got her way.
Among his sins, Vulin favors joining BRICS and had called for a law revealing NGO financing by foreign governments. (When Georgia adopted such a law, EU leaders mobilized to stop it, but failed.)
On the other hand, Vucic defied dire threats by the EU against daring to attend the May 9 celebrations of the Allied Victory over Nazi Germany. He flew around Baltic States blocking his flight and showed up in Moscow, along with the courageous Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico.
Vucic in Moscow on May 9, on his way to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Ramil Sitdikov, RIA Novosti, Presidet of Russia)
Such is the Vucic balancing act. As a result, Vucic is denounced as “pro-Putin” in Brussels while his domestic adversaries denounce him for weakly giving in to EU demands.
The student protesters are still more ambiguous.
They clearly don’t want to give credence to government accusations that they are manipulated by EU NGOs. The EU flag has been tacitly banned from the huge student demonstrations, with only Serbian flags being waved, as if to demonstrate national independence.
However, this spring a contingent of student protesters created a spectacle by setting out to take their grievances to EU institutions, ostensibly on bicycles. They were warmly welcomed as they complained that everything in Serbia was absolutely awful.
On May 6, Serbia’s leading newspaper Politika reported that visiting Serbian blockaders in the European Parliament gallery listened meekly as they were lectured by a Croatian nationalist, Steven Nikola Bartulica, who told them that “European values mean also a confession of guilt for everything Serbia did to Croatia.”
(In the summer of 1995, Croatia expelled about 200,000 Serbs from their homes in the Krajina region of Croatia, in the largest ethnic cleansing of the Yugoslav wars.)
Bartulica claimed Serbia was not a European-style liberal democracy and would not be normalized until it accepted paying reparations to Croatia.
Members of the European Parliament expressed satisfaction that the students had chosen “Europe” against Russia, and called for overthrowing Vucic and Fico for having gone to Moscow.
At home, however, the protest demonstrations seem to be losing momentum, to the extent that students have stopped demanding everything! now! and are retreating to the demand for elections.
Boosted by his trip to Moscow, where his delegation held serious talks with President Vladimir Putin, Vucic held a patriotic rally in the city of Nis where he declared that the students’ demands are over and do not interest him any more. He dismissed the blockaders as a very loud minority of mobbing bullies terrorizing the majority of citizens who want peace, work and unity.
By suddenly demanding snap elections, he assumed that they were simply seeking another opportunity for violent outbursts, since elections will always be declared stolen by the opposition. Elections will be held normally in a year or so, he said.
On May 22, Belgrade received a visit from Kaja Kallas, an Estonian chosen by Ursula von der Leyen to be high representative of the EU for foreign affairs. Having no diplomatic experience, Kallas’ most visible qualifications are being a young woman with an unsurpassed hatred of Russia.
Kallas, center, EU high representative and vice president of the European Commission, at a NATO meeting in Brussels on April 4. (NATO /Flickr/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
While in Belgrade, the EU’s top diplomat met, in a strange twist, with the president and the prime minister to tell them what to do. But she met with representatives of student protesters to listen to what they had to say.
She praised her meetings with “civil society” and youth activists. “I heard their call and their aspirations – for fairness, for accountability so that Serbia can fulfill its full potential,” she said. “Their energy is needed to find a way forward.”
In contrast, Kallas scolded Vucic for meeting Putin in Moscow. Serbia’s future acceptance into the EU, she stressed, depends on the country’s “strategic choice” between East and West.
Putin, by contrast, accepts Vucic’s balancing act and has no objection to Serbia joining the EU. Variety is consistent with a multipolar world. But for the West, “you are with us or against us.” Between East and West, there are no bridges allowed.
Perplexity & Fear
In Belgrade, some people think the protests are petering out. Perhaps, but in the past they have died down only to revive over some incident. Since the causes are unclear, so are the solutions.
The difficulty, Dragan Pavlovic, a Serbian commentator, told me is that the protests are expressed in “very general demands for a ‘better life,’ which obviously does not offer any concrete basis for understanding what is essentially wanted or what should be done to calm the protests.” Such demands can go on forever.
“It is probably an orchestrated, mass hysteria, caused by the nuclear threat, the genocide in Gaza, the prolongation of the crisis in Kosovo and the actions of non-governmental organizations,” he suggests.
Journalist and writer Mara Knezevic Kern considers it impossible to understand these incredible events. “I do not believe that it is possible to describe this new variant of an attack on the state — it has not happened anywhere else yet.” In the 1990s, Yugoslavia served as an experimental laboratory for regime change. Many fear that this is happening again, in Serbia.
Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
We have learned that it is not only the U.S. NGOs who are as numerous and active as cockroaches, but the EU variant as well.. The same applies to the infamous Deep State, whose EU representatives have been cruising alongside their US cousins for years.
It was quite enlightening to observe the new Georgian leadership casually ending the EU attempts at extorting the usual concessions using the same old playbook.. If little Georgia can do it, then Serbia and others can certainly follow the example..
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While the article is pretty accurate on historic background, the analysis of the current state in Serbia leaves out quite a few important details. The current government let corruption grow to enormous levels. Proof exists (for example, in Pandora Papers etc.) that the members of the ruling party are involved in corruption schemes worth millions and they have even stopped trying to hide it as they completely control the public prosecutors, the police and the intelligence services and the media. They openly collaborate with known criminals, president Vucic recently publicly defended one of them – Predrag Koluvija, who was arrested for possession of half a ton of Marijuana and falsified police identification – on the national TV saying that he doesn’t understand why they keep him in prison. None of the politicians involved in the case were arrested but instead the policemen who put Koluvija behind bars were.
The corrupt regime seems to have started thinking that they are allowed to do anything they want and they keep raising the bar, they are building a national football stadium worth 380 million EUR – as a comparison, the Italian football giant Juventus spent less than half of that sum on their venue. At the same time, the capital city Belgrade doesn’t have wastewater treatment nor a subway. The public procurement laws are being suspended to make money laundering easier, protection of cultural heritage sites is being lifted in order for the rich investors (one of them being Jared Kushner) to be able to tear them down, environmental studies have been falsified so that Rio Tinto can open a lithium mine in the agriculturally rich western Serbia which, there being no guarantees of serious investment in waste treatment, is expected to poison a couple of rivers that rank among the cleanest in Europe. And it’s not just the western moneybags that profit from this, Chinese Zijing has also been exempt from respecting the law regarding their mines in the eastern part of the country. This is why the international community is letting Vucic go, any critique he gets from EU or the US or China or Russia is mild and not because Vucic is trying to strategically position his country for the good of its people but because all of them profit from it at the expense of the Serbian people. But the control Vucic and his party have over the media is such that few dare speak about it because they are immediately targeted by the same media with rather primitive and toxic innuendo. Many think that this toxicity is the prime reason for the outbursts of violence mentioned in the article.
No, the students don’t have “very general demands for a ‘better life’” and you couldn’t have missed that part had you checked because they have a list of four demands that they have been repeating over and over, that boil down essentially to a request for the law to be respected. And the students didn’t suddenly bring this about, this fight goes decades back. For example, recent rallies against Rio Tinto, organized before the student protests, brought hundreds of thousands of people to the street. The fact is that Vucic wins elections by outright stealing votes on one hand and discouraging voters from participating in elections because they don’t think they can change anything. The students have reversed this and motivated people to participate, and because of this they already won.
My article is not intended to intervene in the Serbian political scene, which may be as corrupt and unfair as it is elsewhere in Europe, but primarily to point to large scale outside intervention that could take advantage of chaos resulting from endless demonstrations and blockages.
Of course I know the four demands. You can find them on Wikipedia. They boil down to publication of entire documentation on the reconstruction of the Novi Sad railway station and a 20% increase in university budgets. The first seems obvious enough and the other may be excessive, but I question that satisfaction can be gained by shutting down faculties and schools for months, by blockading public activities and least of all by ostentatiously cycling to Strasbourg to complain to the European Parliament.
Diana Johnstone
NGOs are not “the” “civil society”. And neither are the old royal/banking elites and their NGO-nurturing foundations!
They are masters at twisting the meaning of words, though. So much (EU taxpaxer) money goes into linguistic/nudging mindf*#k operations. Europe usurped through literal systematic brainwashing.
Thanks for pointing a finger at the Habsburgs and their bizarre “Paneuropean Union (PEU)” project.
Well said, my friend!
Well said.
It’s great to have you back Diana Johnstone and I wish we could read your work mic more often. No one writes with more clarity on a number of issues but especially Serbia. Yours was the first article anywhere that I saw which clarified the attack on the Nordstream pipeline.
Another invaluable report about the current state of Serbia by the scholar and journalist, Diana Johnstone who is quite astute on European politics and especially on the former nation of Yugoslavia, which the United States and the NATO gunman shattered to pieces for Western capitalist and imperialist expansion for world domination.
Who is sponsoring the well-to-do students in their protests against Alexander Vucic and the majority of Serbian citizens? Could the infamous “international banker” and nation destroyer, George Soros be behind it, funneling money and propaganda information to those particular students as part of the demonizing process of Vucic for attending the May 9 celebration in Moscow? And for the anti-Russian Ursula vonder Leyden to send Kaja Kallas, an Estonian who also hates the Russians, to speak to the student protestors about their complaints is akin to asking the fox to guard the hen house, as a EStonia, along with the other two Baltic nations were pro-Nazi and anti-Russian/Soviet, during WWII. And Croatia? Ever hear of Andrija Artukovic, the Ustase’ Croatian SS leader who was responsible for killing an estimated 800,000 Serbians, Jews and Roma (gypsies) during the Second World War, and his lawyers in LA County, California, were successful in prohibiting the U.S. government from extradition to Yugoslavia to stand trial, but finally succeeded when he was in his 80’s. Look up his name in some of the Los Angeles Times archives.
Rob, Joy and Drew: I agree! Good comments!
So eventually we still don’t know for sure what really is going on. May be some regional reporters who are in Serbia could give more serious detailed answers as to what parts of these protests are not genuine and by what means exactly. While above the part about NGOs and EU officials makes sense, and it fits a known pattern, Pavlovic and Kern in the end are no real help:
`“It is probably an orchestrated, mass hysteria, caused by the nuclear threat, the genocide in Gaza, the prolongation of the crisis in Kosovo and the actions of non-governmental organizations”´
`Journalist and writer Mara Knezevic Kern considers it impossible to understand these incredible events. “I do not believe that it is possible to describe this new variant of an attack on the state — it has not happened anywhere else yet.”´
-huh? And there are UFOs too, or what?
What about going there and talk to those people and do the research? This is not some military secret installation. (re: this is not to the author or Consortium)
The issue is that we still haven’t got better information than this by Mrs. Johnstone.
It´s better than nothing but it´s crazy we still are talking about phantoms basically. How can that be?
Very good observation about what is otherwise a very well-written article about the current situation in Serbia.
In fact, Diane Johnstone’s piece appears to be one of the few attempts — in any media, Western or Eastern, mainstream or independent — to offer an explanation of Serbia’s political situation, despite obvious shortcomings.
As your comment rightly notes, statements from NGOs or EU representatives are often shaped by their own ideological frameworks and fit into a broader geopolitical narrative. Therefore, the unusual social and political situation that Serbia currently finds itself in is interpreted through their lens, not always accurately reflecting local realities.
It is striking how little coverage the Serbian situation receives in Western media as if the European elites don’t want to have strange ideas planted into the heads of their students or perhaps even spark echoes of 1968.
Ultimately, a more informed picture would come from voices directly involved in the protests, whether pro or anti-government. Their perspectives could help separate genuine grassroots discontent from politically or agenda motivated messaging.
It is also worth noting that many Serbians support neutrality as the only viable path through today’s complex geopolitical tensions. Yet at the same time, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the country’s authoritarian governance. A single leader and his inner circle have created a deeply corrupt system marked by a lack of transparency and accountability, where loyalty to the ruling party is often more important than competence.
The article mentions two significant, tragic events as triggers for the protests, but it doesn’t fully explore the possibility that these demonstrations may represent a spontaneous expression of public anger. In a society constantly bombarded with presidential propaganda — painting him as the sole saviour of a small nation — such frustration is understandable. Under this regime, public contracts are frequently awarded to loyal party members, and success in business often depends on political affiliation. Nearly every public (and sometimes private) position is conditioned by party membership and allegiance.
In such a suffocating environment, young people see no future—they do not want to live under a system that demands political conformity just to survive. They are supported by their parents and grandparents, who remember a time when there was also a dominant party, but not one built on kleptocracy. This may explain the nature of these eight-month-long peaceful protests, which are not led by an almost non-existent opposition. The students are not demanding a change of power or a pro-European direction, or other grand reforms. They simply want the institutions to carry out their work in accordance with the constitution.
Today’s students were born after the NATO bombing, but they grow up in a country where few flashy infrastructure projects carried out under Chinese investments mask the general decay of hospitals, schools, public transport, and basic civic institutions, together with growing poverty. Meanwhile, the ruling elite grows ever wealthier, arrogant and narcissistic.
We should all look at the roots of the students’ movement in 1968. That may provide some clues!
Or maybe, I have been naive!
Ms. Johnstone, excellent and informative. The US is coming to the point where their meddling in other countries” affairs will be stopped. BRICS will prevent US brutal sanctions and theft of other countries’ monetary assets. The empire is dying, and it will take Israel down with it.
I appreciate these valuable insights into the situation in Serbia, which to a large extent is being ignored by other journalists and news outlets. Thank you.
Once Putin really started being vilified in the Western press circa 2012 through today, I couldn’t help but notice that all the invective and animus hurled his way greatly mirrored the Slobo bashing that went on during the mid to late 1990s.
Anytime Washington or Euro NGOs and Soros shenanigans are allowed anywhere near your nation’s seats of power or play key roles in society, your nation is then ripe for the pickings for a color revolution.
Two types of nation-states that the Washington-Zio-militarist empire will absolutely not tolerate: 1.) any state that cuts out Wall Street from the majority of its economic system of governance, and/or 2.) Any state that vociferously and consistently calls out the Jew supremacist artificial state of Israel and stands up for Palestinian rights on the international stage.