Mass demonstrations have already toppled the government, explains 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 1^st 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 22^nd 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 22^nd 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 22^nd 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 24^th 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 31^st 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 34^th 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.