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Serbia: Will the Student Revolt Spark a Revolution?

Vladimir Unkovski-Korica

Last week, a mass protest movement in Serbia brought down the country’s government, inaugurating the biggest challenge to the more than decade-old rule of the authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vučić.

The basic chronology of events is now well-known to readers of the Western media. Just over three months ago, on 1st November, a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad, killing 15 people.

With the country still reeling from its first mass school shooting in May 2023, many went into shock and mourning following the latest disaster. But something changed after an incident when regime thugs assailed a gathering of students and staff of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at the University of Belgrade in honour of the victims of the Novi Sad collapse on the 22nd November.

Towards a mass movement

A faculty blockade spread to other institutions of higher and further education in the days that followed. The students made several demands centring on the publication of all documentation related to the reconstruction of the Novi Sad railway station, but also the dismissal of charges against arrested protesters, the prosecution of low-ranking officials who physically assaulted the protesters, and a 20 percent decrease in student fees.

Within a month of the 22nd November attack, the movement had gone from strength to strength. Three quarters of higher education institutions were under occupation. Moreover, the spirit of revolt gripped primary and secondary school students and also their teachers. Already in dispute with the state, rank-and-file teachers have since gone on to defy minimum-service laws and their compromising union leaderships by going out indefinitely in multiple cases.

Indeed, strikes gripped other sectors, unevenly, with media workers, bus drivers, lawyers and even groups of miners expressing support for the student demands. Furthermore, a campaign of civil disobedience spread across the country. Blockading roads and motorways became a favoured tactic as farmers also joined the movement.

On the 22nd December, 100,000 people protested in Belgrade, the biggest mass protest since the toppling of Slobodan Milošević in October 2000. If the government hoped that the movement would die down after the festive period, it was proven wrong. The initiative to ‘Stop, Serbia!’ – a response to the ruling parliamentary group, ‘Serbia must not stop!’ – has had over 231 local protests.

The movement culminated on 24th January with what was called a ‘general strike’, a day of strikes and protests, which coincided with the separate, but also mass boycott of retail chains, not just in Serbia, but in neighbouring Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and North Macedonia, which all emerged as independent states from Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Governmental crisis

Days later, during a 24-hour blockade of the busiest road junction in Belgrade, regime supporters savagely beat a student in Novi Sad, raising tensions. The government of Serbian Prime Minister Milos Vucevic resigned the very next day, while President Vucic addressed the nation, announcing the pardon of protesters and a government reshuffle, pending possible new elections.

Vucic said that calls for transparency had been met with the publication of thousands of pages of documents, a claim rejected by a study produced by the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the University of Belgrade. Reflecting the pressure he is under, Vucic rejected opposition calls for a transitional government of experts pending new elections.

Rather than calming tensions, the resignation of the government and the nervousness of the regime’s strongman appears to have emboldened the student movement, which held a mass, eighty-kilometre march from Belgrade to Novi Sad, where tens of thousands of protesters blocked the three bridges over the Danube River on 31st January.

But the move showed deeper levels of support. The populations of the towns and villages along the route of the march went out on to the streets to greet the students and organised mass cook-outs as a show of support. Taxi associations also pledged dozens of vehicles to help transport students back to Belgrade after the demo in Novi Sad.

By contrast, Vucic has been touring the country, greeting dwindling crowds, with some individuals feeling emboldened enough to openly challenge him. Embattled, Vucic claims that the state is being threatened from without and from within. He argues any change of government would unravel the success of his FDI-led economic model. Serbia attracted a record to €5 billion in foreign direct investments (FDI) last year, marking it out as a regional leader and one of the more dynamic European economies since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Support from abroad

But why would anyone seek to overthrow such a successful government? The Great Powers have rushed in recent weeks to offer their support for Vucic. The EU commission enlargement director-general, Gert Jan Koopman, said that the EU ‘will not accept or support a violent change of power in Serbia.’ Similar pronouncements came from EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s special presidential envoy for Serbia and Kosovo peace negotiations between 2019 and 2021, Richard Grenell, remarked that the US did not support ‘those who undermine the rule of law or who forcefully take over government buildings’, while Moscow decried a ‘colour revolution’ under way and Beijing remarked on Belgrade’s capacity to preserve peace and stability.

All this reflects Vucic’s relatively successful balancing act in international politics. While courting Chinese investment, making Serbia China’s key partner in its 14+1 initiative to promote business and investment relations between China and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Vucic has also promised Serbia’s lithium deposits to Rio Tinto to supply the European Union.

In recent years, there have also been investments by the United Arab Emirates in Belgrade waterfront, while Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is seeking a luxury hotel project in Belgrade on the site of the former army headquarters building, which was bombed by NATO in 1999 and has served as an unofficial reminder of the bombing ever since.

The Big Powers all jockey for position in Serbia, but have no reason to hasten Vucic’s fall. However, they have no permanent allies in the country, merely interests, and they would pursue these whether or not Vucic stays in power. Given the levels of geopolitical turmoil around the Black Sea, with the Russia-Ukraine War, Georgia, Syria, Lebanon, Romania, Moldova and Bulgaria threatening wider instability, a messy change of government in Serbia would not be on anyone’s priority list.

Opposition at home

Yet the population of Serbia is up in arms. To understand that, we should point out that, despite strong growth in Serbia’s GDP, close to four percent last year, living standards are lagging. The country came 34th out of 41 European countries in a ranking compiled by the World Population Review in April 2024.

While average salaries in the country have risen significantly in recent years, the cost of living has also risen, amid demand, energy and monopoly-related inflation. Food inflation has seen staple goods nearly or more than double in price since 2021. Regional wage disparities are growing and a high unemployment rate of over eight percent persists. It is not an accident that Serbia has lost seven percent of its population between 2011 and 2022, reflecting a mass exodus abroad.

Such statistics alone cannot explain why Serbia’s people are in revolt. In fact, it is worth noting that all the above-mentioned investment projects linked to China, Rio Tinto and the EU, the UAE and the US have all faced mass opposition in one form or another, on account of their destructive impact on social fabrics, environmental conditions, urban dynamics and regional balances.

Years of mounting anger have led to significant protest waves since 2014, but little articulation of that anger in a political direction. Unfortunately, Serbia’s political opposition landscape is still dominated by a variety of liberal or conservative-nationalist forces that offer little in terms of a transformative agenda. It is no accident that Vucic’s party is still out-polling all the opposition groups or that his tried-and-tested method for overcoming popular unrest has been to go to the ballot box.

There, his power is more secure than on the streets, where popular feeling does not need to be articulated through the narrow channels of representative democracy. Ruling party power over public sector jobs, the media, the judiciary, the electoral process, and ultimately the machinery of the state repressive apparatus means that the regime’s stability is better served by recourse to elections than contestation in the public sphere.

Where next?

The student movement that has spearheaded the popular movement in the last few months has shown a remarkable ability to overcome regime manoeuvres. Its insistence on its demands has already overcome several regime attempts, by carrot and stick, to dampen the protest mood.

But there will soon come a time when the question of political power will be posed. The country is increasingly ungovernable and Vucic has shown he understands his position is under threat, speaking of the possibility of a referendum about his position or renewed elections. The movement cannot afford to stop now. It must get rid of Vucic and fight for power.

To do so, the movement must insist on its independence from the existing political forces. Without an alternative vision of society, however, that will prove difficult. Already, sections of the movement have begun to accept the opposition’s call for a government of experts pending new elections. Such an eventuality would however leave too many entrenched interests intact, and do nothing to challenge the underlying class inequalities in Serbia, let alone the deep tentacles of the Great Powers in Serbian politics.

As Vincent Bevins has shown in his book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, mass movements dominated the decade 2010 to 2020, but rarely achieved results that protestors aspired to anywhere in the world. A major reason for that was the weakness of the left and of its strategic vision in the movements themselves. In this Serbia is no exception, and its left is weak and atomised.

But the mass movement in Serbia has thrown up some gains worth fighting for in coming weeks, months and years. Using grassroots methods for decision-making in the heat of the struggle, like plenums or general assemblies, students have provided the basis for democratising university institutions going forward. Striking workers can also increasingly see the need to democratise unions, replace compromised officials with more combative elements, and set up militant rank-and-file networks that can act independently of their leaders.

More than that, the popularity of the demand for a general strike, and the fighting spirit of sections of the working class, last seen when the regime of Slobodan Milosevic was toppled, represents a leap in popular consciousness. The willingness to take industrial action for political ends, complementing and strengthening mass forms of civil disobedience, suggests that a rudimentary, but real class consciousness is taking shape.

As Serbia enters a longer period of political instability, reflecting wider international uncertainty, the left in the country has an unprecedented opportunity to strike deeper roots in the working class and fight for a more democratic and just society. By linking the most progressive demands of previous waves of protests, for democratic freedoms, protection of the environment, and the common good, with the current collective cry for justice, the left can show that the problem lies much deeper than corruption and build organisations and institutions that can offer genuine change.

(Vladimir Unkovski-Korica is a member of Marks21 in Serbia and a supporter of Counterfire. He is on the editorial board of LeftEast and teaches at the University of Glasgow. Courtesy: Counterfire, a British socialist organisation that also runs a website.)

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Sense of an Ending

Lily Lynch

This time it’s different. Or so say the students who have been flooding the streets of Serbia for three months now. The protests were triggered by a horrific tragedy on 1 November, when a canopy collapsed at the recently renovated train station in Novi Sad, killing fifteen people. Blaming the accident on the notorious cronyism and graft in Serbia’s construction sector, the protesters have staged a series of confrontations with the authoritarian regime of President Aleksandar Vučić, whose Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has ruled since 2012. The protesters’ slogan is ‘corruption kills’; their symbol – now ubiquitous across the country – is a blood-red handprint.

Opponents of Vučić, a former ultranationalist turned right-wing populist who served as information minister in Milošević’s government, are used to heartbreak and disappointment. Over the past decade, protests have periodically assembled only to dissipate a few months later; Vučić could always count on the protesters to exhaust themselves. Yet the latest upsurge feels unique. For one, it shows no sign of slowing down, and it has been described as one of the largest student-led movements in Europe since May ’68. Last week, it triggered the resignation of Prime Minister Miloš Vučević: an act of desperation which indicated that Vučić is prepared to sacrifice his closest confidants in an effort to stem the discontent. The students’ demand is simple: they are calling on the government to release all documents related to the train station disaster. For them, what happened in Novi Sad is more than just an accident; it is emblematic of a power structure that has been cannibalized by corruption and criminality, and is now collapsing in on itself.

Under Vučić, the Serbian state has become a vast patronage system in which jobs, ministries and construction contracts are awarded to those with political connections. The ruling party functions as an employment programme for the servile and incompetent. While the protesters are not explicitly calling for regime change, their demands for accountability, if met, would see Vučić sent to jail. An end to impunity implies an end to his reign. The students have been careful to avoid association with Serbia’s official opposition, which is itself tainted by venality and easily smeared by pro-government media. Their aim is not simply to swap one patronage network for another. It is to transform the entire political culture. As one protest sign put it: ‘This is not a revolution but an exorcism.’

The state has responded with blunt force. On 22 November, when students at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts held a silent vigil for fifteen minutes – one for every life lost in the canopy collapse – they were attacked by a group of thugs in the employ of the municipal authorities. There followed a string of vehicle attacks on protesters, with cars repeatedly plowing into the crowds. In late January, protesters outside the SNS headquarters in Novi Sad were beaten with baseball bats. On each occasion, the repression has had a galvanizing effect. The reasons for this are partly generational. The Serbian youth does not have the war trauma of the older generations, nor the cynicism of millennials who came of age in the post-Milošević era, and for whom the word ‘democracy’ connotes disappointment and Western meddling.

The students’ anger has nonetheless radiated outwards from young people in urban centres. There have now been protests in well over 200 towns across the country. An astonishing 61% of Serbians now support the movement. When protesters mounted a 24-hour blockade of Belgrade late last month, they were joined by farmers on tractors – evoking the revolt which brought Milošević down a quarter of a century ago – and when they walked 80 kilometres from the capital of Belgrade to Novi Sad last week, they were greeted along the way by thousands of people offering them home-baked goods and tea. As the protesters slept outside in freezing temperatures, local residents furnished them with blankets, pillows and tents.

Vučić is clearly shaken. His public statements have oscillated between defiance – trying to characterize the discontent as yet another ‘colour revolution’ driven by foreign interference – and placation. He initially claimed that the canopy had nothing to do with the recent renovation, but photos say otherwise. His government then announced that it would increase higher education funding by 20% and release the documents in full, but is yet to make good on those promises. (Civil engineers are now demanding to see the construction diaries which would show who worked on the canopy day by day.) Across the former Yugoslavia, from Split to Sarajevo to Ljubljana, young people have turned out in protest to support their Serbian neighbours.

In previous decades, this kind of upheaval would have been encouraged by Western embassies and lavished with foreign aid. At the turn of the millennium, Washington trained Serbia’s opposition activists and helped to organize a parallel vote count in its disputed elections, knitting together the country’s fractured and ideologically diverse opposition at meetings in Budapest, as part of its regime-change programme. But now, in an age of rising geopolitical tension, world powers have an interest in upholding Vučić’s rule – seen as a guarantor of stability in a troubled region. Indeed, the strongman’s attempt to blame the crisis on foreign interference is ironic given the extent of his own reliance on external backing. He enjoys bipartisan support from Washington and is in favour with most European leaders, as well as Russia, China and the UAE. He has earned goodwill by supplying weapons to Ukraine and Israel, and Serbia’s vast lithium reserves have caught the eye of both the EU and the British-Australian multinational Rio Tinto, which is planning to open a new mine in the Jadar Valley despite public opposition.

Serbia has no organized and effective opposition capable of seizing control of the state. Its official parties are divided and unpopular, while the student movement has no electoral vehicle of its own. Vučić therefore believes that he will be able to solve the current crisis either by calling for elections or assembling a new government, but this will not placate the protesters. The SNS’s control of the media has long meant that its electoral success is more or less guaranteed, and recent votes have been marred by ballot-stuffing and allegations of fraud. Some of Vučić’s opponents are therefore calling for a transitional government to organize a free and fair contest. Yet as long as the president has the support of major foreign powers, he will have little incentive to agree.

Without such a peaceful pathway forward, it is likely that the protests will continue over the months ahead, perhaps descending into further violence. A more optimistic scenario, however, would see disgruntled segments of Serbian institutions like the judiciary, which has long been under SNS control, call for members of the current government to be brought to justice. Either way, everyone agrees that the discontent has reached a tipping point. The word on everyone’s lips is ‘there is no going back from this.’ Something fundamental has shifted, and though it is unlikely to translate into revolution in the weeks ahead, the end of the Vučić era no longer seems like a distant or abstract prospect. It finally feels inevitable.

(Lily Lynch is a foreign affairs writer whose work regularly appears in the New Left Review and the New Statesman. Courtesy: Sidecar, the blog of New Left Review. The New Left Review is a British bimonthly journal covering world politics, economy, and culture, which was established in 1960.)