Cnn
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On the first day of November, Aleksandar Matkovic was late for a train. He traveled from Novi Sad, in northern Serbia, to his capital Belgrade, where he works as an economic historian. When he arrived at the station, he witnessed a horror scene that rocked the country to date.
A few minutes before its arrival, the canopy of the station – where the reconstruction was over months earlier – collapsed, crushing the passengers waiting for the platform. Fifteen people were killed.
“I stood there for about two or three hours, staring at the space where the canopy was. Everything was so unrealistic, “Matkovic told CNN.
The shock quickly turned into anger. The crumbled canopy came to serve as a powerful symbol of what many Serbs consider corruption in the heart of the state, sculpted by President Aleksandar Vucic and his government over 12 years in power. What started as vigilles for the dead has become almost daily demonstrations, attracting ever greater segments of Serbian society and reaching every corner of the Balkan nation. “We are in an unexplored territory,” said Matkovic.
The demonstrations led by the students, demanding the complete release of documents on reconstruction work, have become so important and so durable that some wondered if they could bring down the reign of Vucic. “All kinds of questions are going through people’s minds,” said Matkovic.
Vucic has dominated Serbia since coming to power as Prime Minister in 2014, then president three years later. Former information minister of the brutal Yugoslav regime of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian democracy has deteriorated by the Serbian Progressive Party of Vucic (SNS). Freedom House, which measures the strength of democracies, said that Serbia has gone from “free” to “parties” in 2019, citing attacks against the media and the concentration of power in the hands of the president.
Its diet is difficult to classify, according to analysts. It is not as repressive as the Belarus of Aleksander Lukashenko, but neither as permissive as Hungary of Viktor Orban. Ivana Stradner, a member of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said that Vucic had “made Serbia what Russia looked like in the early 1990s, leaning towards a criminal and corrupt state without a state of law”.
However, his detractors praise him as a delighted operator. In an increasingly multipolar world, countries like Serbia – a regional power that the West has tried to turn away from its historic ally of Russia – enjoy many options. For Moscow, Serbia can stem the slide west of other Balkan nations. For Europe, a huge proposed lithium mine could make it important for the green transition. For China, Serbia offers the possibility of extending its influence through the Belt and Road initiative.
Even some in the United States have interests in the country. Jared Kushner, the son -in -law of President Donald Trump, would have worked on an agreement to build a Trump brand hotel in Belgrade, with capital from various Gulf states.
For Serbia, this transactional approach may not be added to a coherent ideology – it has sold weapons to Ukraine but refuses to join sanctions against Russia – but it was profitable. Serbia has been held from Russian gas, Chinese infrastructure, European investment and even sumptuous American construction projects.
This “strategic ambiguity”, as Stradner calls it,, however, made the price of domestic discontent.
“People have enough,” said Engjellushe Morina, principal researcher at the European Council for Foreign Relations. “Students are fed up with this rhetoric … where Vucic says one thing for internal consumption and another thing for international consumption.”
Anger to the government has been preparing for years. In May 2023, when Serbia was shaken by two mass shots, people protested the country’s “culture of violence”. There were more demonstrations after an election disputed later that year, the opposition calling for a replay. They also lasted for weeks but finally failed.
This time is different, say the demonstrators and the analysts. Latent dissatisfaction with the government has found its expression in the tragedy of the Novi Tad station. The station had been reopened in a hurry in 2022 – with Vucic and Orban presents – before an election held that year, before being closed for more works from a Chinese company and its sub -sub Traitors. Matkovic said the Serbs believed that the project was “quickly followed” and “pushed by the political elites”. It reopened in July 2024, only four months before the collapse of its newly built canopy.
Although the previous scandals failed to stick to Vucic, the latter did it. The perception of alleged corruption is “something that unifies everyone,” said Stradner.
Serbian prosecutors have so far charged 13 people for their role in the disaster, notably the former Minister of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure, but the demonstrators demanded that more be done to keep people politically and criminally responsible .
Analysts say that Vucic is clever to thwart manifestations by making targeted concessions, abandoning the allies, by catching the opposition outside the guard or by ridicuing the movement. He regularly labeling demonstrators as “foreign agents” who are trying to stage a “color revolution”, as in other old Soviet states.
But these events represent a new challenge. Because they started as acts of mourning, they were largely exempt from “political” signs such as the flags of the European Union, which Vucic previously used to discredit demonstrations.
The demonstrations also established large expanses of the Serbian company. In scenes recalling the end of the Milosevic regime, farmers joined, leading their tractors to Belgrade.
Even the judges went on board – a shock, given Vucic control over a large part of the judiciary, said Edward P. Joseph, professor at Johns Hopkins University who served for a dozen years in the Balkans, including with NATO.
“Usually, they would never dare to raise their heads publicly, but now they show themselves in silent support for demonstrations,” Joseph told CNN. “The factor of fear has disappeared.”
It is not clear how Vucic can recover this power, said Joseph. Because Vucic must “play this charade” of responsibility, a violent repression would be “to write your own epitaph”.
But the opposite approach – embarking on large -scale democratic reforms – is also difficult, said Morina. Although Prime Minister Milos Vucevic resigned this week, saying that he did it “so as not to increase tensions in society more”, that did not do much to satisfy the demonstrators.
“How convincing it is that he (Vucic) will be able to shoot all this movement he has built – the SNS (the Serbian Progressive Party), the party supporters, the radicals, the football hooligans – how perhaps Does it turn this in a democratic movement? Said Morina.
We do not know what can break the dead end. The protest movement has moved away from opposition politicians, which means that there is no obvious alternative expectations in the wings. But that could be a force, said Stradner.
“It is time to stop having a cult of personality that Serbia has for decades. It is time to believe more in the laws, in the judiciary, in checks and counterweights, than to believe in a type of personality, “she said.