Photograph Source: SergioOren – CC BY 4.0
In Serbia—perhaps the last corner of the world where Brussels’ viceroys, now impotent even within the EU itself, are still inexplicably consulted—stabilocracy has imploded. Along with the collapse of the SNS (the ruling Serbian Progressive Party) regime, the entire political ecosystem that reliably upheld it for twelve years has come crashing down. Not merely because presidents Vučić’s personal fiefdom could only ever thrive amid the wreckage of a state and society left behind by the Siamese twins of today’s Progressives.
Since the 2012 reshuffling within Serbia’s comprador caste, it is they who have assumed the mantle of an anti-popular opposition—parade-ground, parasitic micro-parties with no foothold beyond the polished pavements of Belgrade and Novi Sad, dedicated solely to hoarding public funds and foreign donations. Having an actual membership with opinions, or an electorate that dares to ask questions, is seen as a bothersome liability. Compared to their Twitter posturing, the crude vote-buying of the poor with cooking oil and flour starts to look like genuine concern for the common folk.
This new breath of popular will and democratic stirrings in Serbia is, ironically, the very byproduct of parliamentary collapse into a tycoon-comprador operetta.
In Serbia today, it is no longer difficult to stand with the students and against Vučić—who, much like the final days of America-backed despot Reza Pahlavi before the Iranian Revolution, has managed to unify the most ideologically disparate factions against himself. Yet beyond the tabloid fever dreams of a “color revolution,” festering like boils on the body of a student movement that has assertively emerged as the primary force in Serbian politics, we see a new crop of Iznogouds—opportunists seeking, through OTPOR (an organization from the 1990s supported by American funding against the regime of Slobodan Milošević)-style tactics and the familiar spiral of jungle law and self-humiliation (the only true legacy of the post-Milošević era), to carve out a fatter slice of the pie for a rival comprador-oligarchic dynasty.
The childish notion that Vučić might engineer his own downfall via an obscure so-called “expert government”—a relic of history’s junkyard, now populated by the SNS’s softer, less radical faces spouting anti-corruption rhetoric (à la Ana Brnabić in her early days)—with Đura Macut as a placeholder prime minister and no serious guarantees for real reform, is the latest lifeline pseudo-oppositional circles are offering the regime’s machinery. A feeble bid to defuse the rising social pressure, which has proven to be the only force capable of pushing Vučić’s satraps onto the defensive.
Peddling technocratic shock therapy as a remedy for an acute political crisis—sidestepping the unified demands of the student plenums—while Serbia cries out for republican dialogue and constitutionalism, is an act of civic illiteracy potentially more damaging than the rabble-rousing street politics it pretends to transcend.
These demagogic slogans were first sounded by the leadership of the internal pressure group Stav, emerging from the cloak of Dinko Gruhonjić and, before him, Milenko Perović—himself a financial-bureaucratic lever of Đukanović’s DPS regime and a leading voice of Austro-Slavic, Štedimlija-style racialism at the University of Novi Sad. Together, they had schemed to use a metaphorical hammer on March 15 against student marshals—young people who, with their blood types written on their forearms, were preventing the student body from becoming cannon fodder for anyone’s agenda.
Meanwhile, the foundation-funded pen of Tomislav Marković, who mourned a supposed lack of solidarity from colleagues who promptly distanced themselves from such vile intrigues, had not lifted a finger over the police crackdown on citizen-journalist Srđa Žunić, nor the arrests of peasant protesters from Mačva.
But the ultimate low point of this kind of filth was reached by Peščanik’s resident pamphleteer from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Stevan Filipović, who, in his polemical screeds, chastises students in tones reeking of clerical-police condescension—everything but the cassock and badge—accusing them of capitulating to youth-corrupting forces, from Putin’s agents to anarcho-syndicalist utopians (a jab clearly aimed at the assemblies behind the Letter to the People of Serbia). And why? Simply because they refuse to cave to the pedantic blackmail of a hollow, petty-bourgeois secular priesthood, which insists on presenting its own political own goals as divinely inspired directives.
Taking a case all the way to Strasbourg—regardless of perfectly legitimate Euroscepticism—is entirely justified given Serbia’s subordinated position within the EU. This is the same EU that celebrates Giolani’s batons and nullifies the electoral will of Romanian citizens. In this light, legal recourse becomes a form of protest against Brussels’ favoritism toward the tentacles of Vučić’s regime—much like the Serbian peasant in Petar Kočić’s tale threatens the feudal lord with taking him “all the way to the Kaiser,” but without the groveling of petitioning the Sultan for protection from the Dahije.
How deeply such unrequited love can sting was revealed during the Tel Aviv excursion of Milorad Dodik, President of Republika Srpska—a man of extraordinary talent for promoting his own tormentors in venues like West Mostar, Washington, Budapest, or among AfD/FPO neo-Nazis under the cloak of phony anti-imperialism. There, he delivered a tribute of nearly one million taxpayer dollars from Republika Srpska to Mark Zell, Trump’s diaspora envoy, to launder his image in front of American patrons even as the genocide in Gaza raged on.
Taken more broadly, Dodik’s toast on foreign soil—the equating of the anti-colonial struggle of Bosnian Serb peasant masses, as historically materialist Milorad Ekmečić understood it, with the Zionist settler project of displacing Palestinian farmers, orchestrated by British imperialism—is more fitting for Kalaj’s synthetic Bosnian nation project than for any patriot of Republika Srpska. It stands as a profound insult to national honor.
They say the path of revolution winds and twists, while the roads of reaction run straight like arrows. Whatever the outcome of the April maneuverings over the formation of the government, I take quiet sustenance from the thought that Vasa Pelagić and Mita Cenić—nineteenth-century Serbian champions of social justice—would be heartened to cast their eyes once more upon their people. We have shown ourselves not so far beneath them after all. And to write off not only the freshmen—who, after the blockade semester, still have at least five years of university ahead of them—but also the wider citizenry, who, after three decades of degradation, have finally tasted a breath of popular democracy, would be like trying to send rivers back to their sources.
Just like the insurgents of the Sretenje Uprising, who refused to hitch Serbia’s fate to the Romanov or Habsburg fleets, instead hacking out a Robinsonian island of liberty, at first stretching only from Belgrade to Aleksinac—despite imperial power projections that extended from Niš to Djibouti, from Ada Ciganlija to the Elbe—so too does our moment insist: every temporary defeat is a step on the staircase toward final upheaval and transformation.
Or, as Bogdan Žerajić (the assassin of the Austro-Hungarian governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, General Marijan Varešanin) consoled himself amid the ruin and disorientation of his time:“Nothing. A trifle. There will be people among the youth, in the indestructible and unconquerable Serbian nation.”
