How Serbia’s Students Unseated Vučić (w/ Damjan Krnjević Mišković)

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that most of our listeners are probably not paying super close attention to Serbian politics on an ongoing basis.

Many may have seen that there was a kind of a pretty dramatic change election that happened.

Could you start out just by explaining from your point of view, like what happened and why?

Sure.

Let me see if I can do this in a way that doesn't sound overdramatic, but that I think is underappreciated.

When Vucic and his cronies came to power in this, until even in the context of this election, really the last free and fair election in Serbia in 2012, they began in a very systematic way to really capture the stake.

And over time, Vucic and his sort of core group of collaborators really did engage in what amounts to running an organized criminal enterprise whilst eventually becoming the head of state of the country.

It's something that's underappreciated, I think, because one of the characteristics of his rule was that he was willing to engage with and make whatever concessions were necessary with the various sort of relevant external actors to, you know, allow him to continue to engage in very repressive political activity domestically, but to do so in a way that ensured that Criticism from abroad was left at a bare minimum.

So you're saying he kind of did just enough to keep Western governments from really becoming upset?

Yes, and not just Western governments.

I think that he was very accommodationist, not just with the United States and the European Union and some of the main member states of the EU, but also Russia and China and Turkey and so on.

He was very, very skilled at being able to do that and to play some of them off against each other, to make whatever concessions to allow dirty money to come in to construct entire new neighborhoods, to do whatever really was required in order for him and his core group of co-conspirators to just be able to have free reign domestically in the country.

And there are a whole bunch of reasons for that that we can get into, but that was essentially his modus operandi.

Now, within that context, obviously, corruption was ripe.

you know, all of the usual things that you would imagine as a result of this way of conducting domestic affairs.

A couple of years ago, one of these construction projects, which was the construction of a new train station in a city, to the north of Belgrade called Novi Sad was, there was this canopy over this train station that Vucic had stated was, you know, the cutting edge of European train stations or whatever.

The canopy collapsed because of shoddy construction and, you know, no inspections and all the rest of it.

And it killed nearly 20 people.

No, there was no accountability.

There was no No one resigned, no one got, you know, there was no trial, nothing, right? Just straight up impunity.

And the consequence of all of this was that there arose this bottom up movement that was led by students, right? high school students, university students, graduate students, that slowly coalesced into a real popular movement of discontent.

They were able to capture the opposition political space because they were able to portray the various opposition parties as being ineffective or not having the right kind of leadership or whatever.

which was not exactly untrue.

And at the same time, they were able slowly to push back through a really good, incredibly well-thought-out grassroots campaign that involved really just traveling to every little hamlet in the country.

They were able to gain ground against the Vucic regime.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that most of our listeners are probably not paying super close attention to Serbian politics on an ongoing basis.

Many may have seen that there was a kind of a pretty dramatic change election that happened.

Could you start out just by explaining from your point of view, like what happened and why?

Sure.

Let me see if I can do this in a way that doesn't sound overdramatic, but that I think is underappreciated.

When Vucic and his cronies came to power in this, until even in the context of this election, really the last free and fair election in Serbia in 2012, they began in a very systematic way to really capture the stake.

And over time, Vucic and his sort of core group of collaborators really did engage in what amounts to running an organized criminal enterprise whilst eventually becoming the head of state of the country.

It's something that's underappreciated, I think, because one of the characteristics of his rule was that he was willing to engage with and make whatever concessions were necessary with the various sort of relevant external actors to, you know, allow him to continue to engage in very repressive political activity domestically, but to do so in a way that ensured that Criticism from abroad was left at a bare minimum.

So you're saying he kind of did just enough to keep Western governments from really becoming upset?

Yes, and not just Western governments.

I think that he was very accommodationist, not just with the United States and the European Union and some of the main member states of the EU, but also Russia and China and Turkey and so on.

He was very, very skilled at being able to do that and to play some of them off against each other, to make whatever concessions to allow dirty money to come in to construct entire new neighborhoods, to do whatever really was required in order for him and his core group of co-conspirators to just be able to have free reign domestically in the country.

And there are a whole bunch of reasons for that that we can get into, but that was essentially his modus operandi.

Now, within that context, obviously, corruption was ripe.

you know, all of the usual things that you would imagine as a result of this way of conducting domestic affairs.

A couple of years ago, one of these construction projects, which was the construction of a new train station in a city, to the north of Belgrade called Novi Sad was, there was this canopy over this train station that Vucic had stated was, you know, the cutting edge of European train stations or whatever.

The canopy collapsed because of shoddy construction and, you know, no inspections and all the rest of it.

And it killed nearly 20 people.

No, there was no accountability.

There was no No one resigned, no one got, you know, there was no trial, nothing, right? Just straight up impunity.

And the consequence of all of this was that there arose this bottom up movement that was led by students, right? high school students, university students, graduate students, that slowly coalesced into a real popular movement of discontent.

They were able to capture the opposition political space because they were able to portray the various opposition parties as being ineffective or not having the right kind of leadership or whatever.

which was not exactly untrue.

And at the same time, they were able slowly to push back through a really good, incredibly well-thought-out grassroots campaign that involved really just traveling to every little hamlet in the country.

They were able to gain ground against the Vucic regime.