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Mass protests in Serbia/CNN: How is a hardline president's downfall being threatened by a train station tragedy?

2025-02-02 12:40:24Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Mass protests in Serbia/CNN: How is a hardline president's downfall being
Protests in Serbia

On the first day of November, Aleksandar Matkovic was late for his train. He was traveling from Novi Sad, in northern Serbia, to its capital, Belgrade, where he works as an economic historian. When he arrived at the station, he witnessed a scene of horror, the aftermath of which has shaken the country to this day.

Minutes before it arrived, the station's tent, where reconstruction had been completed months earlier, collapsed, crushing passengers waiting on the platform. Fifteen people lost their lives.

" I stood there for about two or three hours, just staring blankly at the space where the tent was. It was all so unreal ," Matkovic told CNN.

Shock from the tragedy quickly turned to anger. The collapsed spire has served as a potent symbol of what many Serbs see as corruption at the heart of the state, carved out by President Aleksandar Vučić and his government during their 12 years in power. What began as a tribute to the dead has turned into almost daily protests, drawing in ever-larger segments of Serbian society and reaching every corner of the Balkan nation. “We are in uncharted territory ,” Matkovic said.

Student-led demonstrations demanding the full release of documents related to the reconstruction works have become so large and so persistent that some suspect they could go so far as to topple Vučić’s reign. “All kinds of questions are running through people’s minds,”  Matkovic said.

Vučić has dominated Serbia since coming to power as prime minister in 2014, then president three years later. A former information minister under Slobodan Milošević’s brutal Yugoslav regime, Vučić has degraded Serbian democracy under his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Freedom House, which measures the strength of democracies, said Serbia fell from “free” to “not free” in 2019, citing attacks on the media and the concentration of power in the hands of the president.

His regime is hard to categorize, analysts say. It is not as repressive as Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus, but not as permissive as Viktor Orban's Hungary. Ivana Stradner, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Vučić has made Serbia like Russia in the early 1990s, inclined toward a criminal, corrupt state without the rule of law.

Yet his critics praise him as a shrewd operator. In an increasingly multipolar world, countries like Serbia, a regional power that the West has tried to distance from its historic ally Russia, enjoy many options. For Moscow, Serbia could block the path to the West for other Balkan nations. For Europe, a proposed large lithium mine could make it important for a green transition. For China, Serbia offers the opportunity to expand its influence through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Several people in the United States also have interests in the country. Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law, is working on a deal to build a Trump-branded hotel in Belgrade, with capital from various Gulf states.

For Serbia, this transactional approach may not add up to a coherent ideology—it has sold weapons to Ukraine but refuses to join sanctions against Russia—but it has been profitable. Serbia has been kept supplied with Russian gas, Chinese infrastructure, European investment, and even brilliant American construction projects.

Turning point

However, this strategic ambiguity, as Stradner calls it, has come at the cost of domestic discontent.

“ People have had enough ,” said Engjellushe Morina, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“Students are fed up with this rhetoric… where Vucic says one thing for domestic consumption and another thing for international consumption.”

Anger at the government has been building for years. In May 2023, when Serbia was rocked by two mass shootings, people protested against the country’s culture of violence. There were more demonstrations after disputed elections later that year, with the opposition calling for a rerun. They also lasted for weeks, but eventually died down.

This time it’s different, protesters and analysts say. The latent discontent with the government found expression in the tragedy of the Novi Sad station. The station had been hastily reopened in 2022, with Vučić and Orbán in attendance, ahead of elections held that year, before being closed for more work by a Chinese company and its subcontractors. Matković said Serbs felt the project was fast-tracked and pushed by political elites. It reopened in July 2024, just four months before its newly constructed tent collapsed.

While previous scandals have failed to hold Vučić accountable, this one has. The perception of alleged corruption is “one thing that unites all people,” Stradner said.

Serbian prosecutors have so far indicted 13 people for their role in the Novi Sad disaster, including the former minister of construction, transport and infrastructure, but protesters have demanded that more be done to hold people politically and criminally accountable.

"The fear factor is gone"

Analysts say Vučić is adept at thwarting protests by making targeted concessions, alienating allies, catching the opposition by surprise or mocking the movement. He regularly labels protesters as foreign agents trying to stage a color revolution, as in other former Soviet states. But these demonstrations present a new challenge. Because they began as acts of mourning, they were largely devoid of political symbols such as the European Union flags, which Vučić has used in the past to discredit demonstrations.

The protests have also drawn broad swaths of Serbian society. In scenes reminiscent of the end of Milosevic's regime, farmers have united, driving their tractors into Belgrade.

Even judges have joined in, a shock given Vučić's control over much of the judiciary, said Edward P. Joseph, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University who served for several years in the Balkans.

" Normally they would never dare raise their heads in such a public way, but now they are showing themselves in silent support of the protests ," Joseph told CNN. "The fear factor is gone."

It is not clear how Vucic can regain that power, Joseph said. Because Vucic must play this role of responsibility, a violent crackdown on the protests would be "writing his epitaph."

But the opposite approach, initiating large-scale democratic reforms, is also challenging, Morina said. Although Prime Minister Milos Vucevic resigned this week, saying he did so to avoid further increasing tensions in society, that has not satisfied the protesters.

"How convincing is it that he (Vučić) will be able to turn this whole movement that he has built, the SNS (Serbian Progressive Party), the party supporters, the radicals, the football hooligans, how can he turn this into a democratic movement? " Morina said.

It is not clear what could break the deadlock. The protest movement has distanced itself from opposition politicians, meaning there is no obvious alternative waiting in the wings. But that could be a strength, said Ivana Stradner.

"It's time to stop having a personality cult that Serbia has had for decades. It's time to trust more in the laws, in the judiciary, in checks and balances, rather than trusting in some kind of personality ," she said./ Taken from CNN.


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