ESSAY. “Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vučić is not an ordinary man. He is extraordinary. He is more than capable of doing the job of president, prime minister, minister, fireman, basketball coach, you name it… But with the protests never stopping, will he finally be kicked out?” writes journalist and writer Predrag Dragosavac in this essay.
The is an essay. The opinions expressed are those by the author.
In most European countries, the prime minister is the main one in charge, not the president. Serbia is not an exception. By the Serbian constitution, the president has, more or less, a ceremonial role, but Aleksandar Vučić has been the one “ruling” the country in practice. The prime minister, who resigned due to protests, has basically been a contentless puppet; his name is not really worth mentioning.
The million-dollar question is: What is it called when a prime minister, constitutionally and officially “the top executive”, is only a puppet; and when a “ceremonial president” is the one deciding and controlling everything in the country?
Bingo! The answer is correct. This is a violation of the constitution and usurpation of power.
In this case, though, it is not proper or polite to call it that.
Aleksandar Vučić is not an ordinary man. He is extraordinary. He is more than capable of doing the job of president, prime minister, minister, epidemiologist, basketball coach, you name it… He can do whatever he wants. And he wants to do a lot.
He is not sleeping at all, he works and works, around the clock – 18, 20, 24 hours a day. All for the well-being of Serbia and Serbian people. He is fighting against countless enemies. Bleeding for Serbian interests. It is an honour for him to sacrifice himself for the people he loves.
He is best buddies with Trump, Putin and Xi. With Orban, Macron, and von der Leyen, too.
There is nothing that he is not able to do.
He is the one buying vaccines for covid. He is the one rescuing children from snowdrifts. He is the one providing jobs and opportunities like he is a Public Employment Service, “Arbetsförmedlingen” in Swedish. He is the one deciding which football team will be the eternal state champion. He is the one smiling at you from the huge billboard or mural at the entrance of every single village in Serbia. He is the one that can jump out, even when you open your refrigerator.
I doubt that there is another such president in the whole world.
According to the Bureau for social research, that specializes in media monitoring, he was the “main star” in 350 (sic!) live broadcasts on television with national frequency last year. Imagine that – your president is addressing you live practically every single day! Always in monologues, of course, never ever in debate with opposition leaders; they are not worthy of addressing him directly and “cannot reach his heights even in their dreams”. He is saying that, it’s not me joking.
I doubt that there is another such president in the whole world.
Aleksandar Vučić is unique.
The smartest, the most competent, the hardest working…
The most gorgeous, too, although too modest to say so himself. And he doesn’t want Trump to get jealous, so that Serbia, God forbid, suffers because of it.
The glorious inauguration
In the beginning of July last year, he, with his entire entourage, inaugurated the renovated Railway Station in Novi Sad. That was, in fact, the second “official inauguration” of it – the first one was staged during the election campaign, together with Victor Orban.
It is one of those state infrastructure projects that should cost millions of Euros, that end up getting paid 5, 10, 15 or 50, times more. One of those that are too important to organize a tender for.
In the opening ceremony, as always, pompous words and self-praise flowed. New big promises were given. “Serbia, which is already an economic tiger, will continue to rush forward, it can’t ever stop…” Just four months later, the concrete canopy collapsed ”out of the blue”, in the middle of the working day, killing 15 people sitting and standing below it. Two people survived a long coma, but woke up severely disabled.
In the first statements after the tragedy, the minister of construction was blaming ”Tito’s architect”, who designed the railway building in the early 1960s. According to the highest state officials, including the extraordinary one, there was no one else to be held responsible.
That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, to much even for Serbians that were for years silently “eating” such argumentations.
At first, people would gather in the street to stop traffic, and stand in silence for 15 minutes, something similar to what mothers and relatives of the missing ones were doing in Argentina and Chile. That kind of reminder about the responsibility of “the untouchables” was too irritating, so they started sending their ”volunteers”. First to verbally threaten and assault, then to beat people that were standing in silence, and finally to deliberately drive cars into the protesters. Students and professors of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade were among the first ones to be beaten.
People got infuriated. Little by little, a symbolic small protest was turning into a massive one. Students took the lead. It would be more accurate to say that the leading role in the protests “naturally” came to them, since practically all other political or social ”subjects” (opposition parties, NGO’s) are either either marginalized, irrelevant or discredited. People no longer trust anyone “official” (even from the opposition). In that sense, students literally appeared as Deus ex Machina, expressing and canalizing the mood of many people.
Since November, there were protests and blockades in the biggest cities – Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš, Kragujevac. Then, one by one, small towns and villages started to join. Every single day there are protests all over the country.
The biggest one so far was in Novi Sad, February 1, when tens of thousands of people from all of Serbia gathered and blocked three bridges in the city. Students walked 80-90 kilometers from Belgrade to Novi Sad. Thousands of cab drivers from Belgrade went to pick them up and bring them back on Sunday. All together it really looked impressive, almost unreal. Or surreal. Many people cried.
How far can the protests go?
It is very likely that this Saturday, February 15, even more people will gather in Kragujevac, which was the first capital of modern Serbia. It was there, on February 15, 1835, that the first Serbian constitution was proclaimed, dividing power into legislative, executive and judicial, limiting the power of the ruler and proclaiming rights and freedom of citizens. The big “irony” of today’s despotic Serbia is that “Constitution Day” is celebrated as a national holiday; therefore, the idea of gathering and protesting in Kragujevac on that very “Constitution day” is to emphasize violations of the constitution and disrespect of citizens’ rights.
How far can all this go on and what are the goals of the protests?
Well, at first, nobody expected something like this to happen, especially not with so many “die hard” young people engaging this enthusiastically and persistently. So, it has already gone on further than anybody could have imagined. People re-discovered the power of their voice (which has been suppressed for so long), the power of of solidarity, of fighting for a cause. This inebriation has led to an eruption of energy that no one believed even existed in society.
It all started with the request for basics: rule of law, responsibility, institutions that function… However, in the state of absolute corruption, where it is just (the extraordinary) one in charge of everything (starting with thinking), those basics prove to be unreachable. Students’ “waving” with rule of law, responsibility, and functional institutions reminds me of the use of garlic in vampire stories and movies. Political vampires are getting nervous as Dracula before dawn. Their “monumental” power structure looks more and more like a tower of cards.
”It’s another cheap attempt of Orange Revolution”, they are claiming. Their media – and they control almost the entire media space in the country – are permanently labelling students and other protesters as traitors and anti-Serbian elements who are ”undermining the country in a difficult moment”.
However, as protests continue to spread with time, they are getting far beyond just the political realm. It is an awakening from a long-term anesthesia of lies, propaganda and brainwashing; a roar against the violence, hate speech and vulgarity that has covered the entire public horizon; an instinctive attempt (from the guts) to escape a worn-out narrative that has been “imprisoning” pure life for decades now. In that sense, they can be understood as fighting for life, for the right to live and to have a future.
My impression is that the EU largely has forgotten the Balkans
It’s very interesting and indicative that people all over the region, starting from Croatia, are closely following what is going on…and “supporting students”. Many are “jealous”, wanting such protests (against corruption) to happen in their country as well. Thanks to “the students” relations between the peoples in the region warmed up as never before in the last 35 years. That maybe tells the most about the general message, achievements, desires…
“My impression is that the EU largely has forgotten the Balkans…”, a Swedish colleague remarks, adding: “It is also interesting that von der Leyen does not come out strongly in favour of the protesters, looks like they don’t want to create problems for those in power…”
The EU didn’t forget the Balkans, but von der Leyen and her EU associates are consistently shifting attention away from the Balkans – i.e., the countries of former Yugoslavia. Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia…
The general state of these countries – their total corruption and dysfunctionality – is the best indicator of the complete failure of the EU’s decades long ”leadership and guidance”. The EU guided them to the literal dead end – political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual, demographic. Even Croatia, an EU-member, is rotten to the bone by corruption. Bosnia and Herzegovina, which still has the high EU’s commissionaire as the top authority, is remaining hopelessly trapped in a schizophrenic frame.
And Serbia… Although the erosion and destruction of society has been going for decades, for different reasons, I would claim that this 12 years long rule of Aleksandar Vučić has been one of the worst destructions of society – its moral, cultural, and intellectual tissue, in modern Serbian history (since the previously mentioned Constitution). During these 12 years a complete intertwining of party, crime, state and public institutions, church and media, has been established. The tissue of society got rotten to the core.
The corruption is so absolute that it seems as if there is no life outside of it. It has been completely transparent and direct, not leaving any dilemma: if you are with them ”the sky’s the limit”, if you are not – then you are out and you don’t exist.
At the same time, von der Leyen, Scholz, Baerbock, Macron and a bunch of other “EU leaders” are pretending that everything is fine in Serbia – ”a great progress on the European path”. Acting as they have been acting continuously, they were providing legitimacy to the establishment and nurturing of a despotic order.
Almost 30 years ago, my generation spent three winter months (November 1996 to January 1997) on the streets protesting against Milošević. An interesting similarity is that this protest also was very poorly reported in the Western media, so you certainly don’t remember how it ended. After three months, the emissaries of the European Union came, first Lamberto Dini, then Felipe Gonzalez, to provide Milošević a life belt.
EU prefers despots and tyrants who are seemingly holding all levers of power
To remind you, this happened only a year and a half after Srebrenica, and for the European Union and the United States, Milošević is a ”peace guarantee.” They didn’t care a bit about stolen elections, and thousands of students, citizens, and followers of opposition parties that were protesting daily for months – during a winter that was much colder than today.
The “sensmoral” on the basis of plenty of such “practical experiences” is pretty clear. In the countries “on the periphery” (“global South”), as post-Yugoslav are, including Serbia, the EU prefers despots and tyrants who are seemingly holding all levers of power and controlling everything, than unconditionally supporting democracy, plurality, institutions, rule of law.
Acting in such a way in Serbia and elsewhere in ”the region”, the EU have repeatedly trampled on all supposed values and basically discredited the ideas of both Europe and the union. It is paradigmatic that the EU leadership once again prefers to play “the safe card”; of “the good old despot” in Serbia, rather than to pick “the new life”.
What will the outcome be?
It is hard to predict what the outcome of these protests will be. However, there are certain things that became clear already. Like that boy in “The Emperor’s new suit”, these protests revealed not only the corruptive, violent, anti-democratic nature of a despotic regime, but also its shakiness despite apparent monolithicity. At the same time, they revealed – once again – the shortsightedness and lack of vision of the European Union which is betraying its own fundamental principles.
My generation believed that the EU was on our side, since we were fighting for universal values and rights that we were considering “European” as well. But we learnt that European values and the EU can often be quite opposite notions, not to say opposites. So, will this happen again?
I don’t know where the stone that the Serbian students set in motion will eventually end up. I really want it to go as far as possible. Because a brand-new narrative – based on universal values and principles – is what we all need more than anything. Now, and in the future.
Predrag Dragosavac
Journalist and writer based in Serbia, previously living in Sweden.
A shorter, Swedish version av this text has previously been published here.
Read also
|
Uppläsning av artikel
|
