Is real change coming to Serbia?
Serbia’s government has come under intense pressure since a deadly disaster at Novi Sad’s main railway station last November. Student-led protests have spiralled into a nation-wide resistance movement and for months, Serbians have been speaking out against corruption, a lack of accountability, and a culture of impunity in Aleksandar Vučić’s regime. But if you’re listening to this from Western Europe, or indeed much of the rest of the world, the odd headline is probably all you’ve seen.
What are these protests really about? And what makes them different? This week, an in-depth conversation about what it’s like to be living through a potential turning point in Serbian history.
hosts
Wojciech Oleksiak & Katy Lee
pRODUCTION, SCORING AND Mixing
Wojciech Oleksiak
Music
Jim Barne, Mobygratis & Epidemic Sounds
Editorial support: Morgan Childs, Dominic Kraemer and Katz Laszlo
With thanks to Nikola Radić
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KATY LEE: Hey, Wojciech.
WOJCIECH OLEKSIAK: Hi, hello.
K: How are you doing? Having a good week over there in Poland?!
W: Fantastic.
K: Oh man, what a week.
W: Yeah, what a week. So the reason behind me being a bit grumpy is that we’ve got a new president-elect in Poland. His name is Karol Nawrocki, and he’s a loyalist of the Law and Justice Party — you know, the one that ruled from 2015 to 2023 and worked really hard to turn Poland into a copy of Orban’s Hungary.
K: Hmmm.
W: So you know, I’m not thrilled, as you can imagine. Basically I feel like every worry I’ve voiced on this very podcast over the past few months has materialised. You know, we had a shot at more just, fair governance — and it really seems like this government has blown it completely. And it took so much to get this chance that like, now my frustration level is at an all-time high.
K: Oh, I’m sorry.
W: Yeah, it’s just, you know, it’s not nice. But anyway! That’s enough about this fantastic election. This week we are going south a couple of countries, to Serbia.
K: Yeah, you so may have seen a trickle of headlines over the past half year or so, about these big, big protests in Serbia. But if you’re listening to this from Western Europe, and also probably a lot of the rest of the world, a trickle of headlines is probably all you have seen. But these protests are a massive deal. Can you give us the basics of what they’re about, Wojciech?
W: So, these protests were sparked by a really tragic incident in Serbia’s second-biggest city, Novi Sad, last November. And the city’s main railway station had recently finished some renovations, which included building a new canopy, and for those who like me didn’t know that word, it’s this kind of an overhanging roof which protects people from the sun or rain. And it was made out of concrete, so it was really really heavy. And on November 1st, it collapsed onto the people who were sitting and walking below. And 16 people were killed.
K: Yeah, it was just an awful, awful incident. And the thing that’s really important to understand is that Serbia has this history of dodgy infrastructure deals – often involving funding from the Chinese government – that also happen to enrich members of the elite, and give money to companies in the orbit of members of that elite. You know, rather than actually just being intended to give ordinary Serbians a better quality of life. And so, when this terrible disaster struck – it just felt to a lot of people like the straw that broke the camel’s back. Now, the investigation into what actually caused the collapse of this huge slab of concrete is still ongoing, but various experts have come out since the accident and said, you know, we raised concerns that all this renovation work at the station was being rushed, but no one wanted to listen. And to a lot of people, the instinct was to see this as proof of this endemic problem that Serbia has with shoddy infrastructure work that mostly just enriches the elite. Proof that corruption kills.
W: And then the disaster sparked these massive protests across the whole of Serbia, led by students but with people from all different backgrounds taking part. And let’s be clear, this is not the first time that Serbia has seen mass protests. But these ones do feel different. And it feels like the most serious challenge in a really long time – maybe ever – to Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić. We’ve talked about Vučić quite a few times on The Europeans before, but basically for the past 13 years he has been the one calling the shots in Serbia and he built a party, SNS - the Serbian Progressive Party – that to a great extent became synonymous with the state. By which I mean that from the tiniest local municipality, through police and judiciary, up to the government itself, they seem to be controlling it all.
K: So, you’re a keen Serbia-watcher, Wojciech. For the uninitiated, it would be fair to describe Vučić and his SNS party as authoritarian, right?
W: Well, I’m not big on giving labels, but as far as my knowledge goes it is the case of the biggest consolidation of power in Europe these days, except for Belarus and Russia.K: And just to flag it up, because it’s easy to forget – Serbia is an EU candidate country, it is in the waiting room to join this group of supposed liberal democracies. Vučić has a tricky relationship with the EU – there’s a really close economic relationship which both sides want to protect, but Vučić has also has this very cosy relationship with Vladimir Putin.
But now there’s a very real-seeming challenge to the regime that Vučić has built in Serbia. So it’s a really fascinating time in the country, even if you might not be hearing that much about it in the news where you are. So this week, we wanted to do something a little bit different. We wanted to bring you a conversation with one, quote unquote, ‘normal’ Serbian – so not a journalist, not an analyst, just a regular person.
M: I want the change to be real. I don’t want to just replace this regime, this government, with something slightly nicer. I don’t want rampant corruption, I want the quality of life to improve.
K: And we wanted to spend the whole of this episode – which is brought to you in collaboration with our radio friends at Euranet Plus – with this one person, trying to figure out what it is like to be Serbian, right now.
W: By no means we’re trying to say that this person’s experience is representative of every single person’s experience in Serbia, but we do hope that it’s gonna give you a personal insight into what’s been happening behind the headlines. And the person I found for you – after a lot of searching – is Marko.
K: Marko, thank you so much for joining us today.
MARKO: Thank you for having me, a pleasure to be here.
W: Marko isn’t his real name – we’ve changed his name to protect his safety, which might give you an idea of how worried Serbians are about getting in trouble with the government if they say anything critical in public.
M: I'm Marko. I'm in my thirties, mid thirties, let's say.I was born in Belgrade, which is the capital of Serbia. I was raised in a more or less typical middle class family, you could say. It was quite the troubled time in the 90s, as you can imagine. My family did the best they could in the difficult post-civil war period.
W: The civil war that tore Yugoslavia apart ended with NATO’s bombings of Belgrade in 1999 — an operation that was carried out without UN approval, and it is still hotly debated today. And it is a major reason many Serbians remain wary of the West. Marko, at the time though, was just living a fairly typical city kid’s life: school, sports, computer games.
I loved playing around with the computers as soon as I could get one. I think my first computer was a Pentium 5, if you can... What a throwback.
K: I'm the daughter of a computer engineer, so yes, that is a good retro reference.
M: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Such a childhood memory. But in any case, possibly due to all this turmoil, societal turmoil that's been happening in my youth, I became interested in religion late in my elementary school, and I opted into an elective religion class in my high school.
K: Marko’s fascination with religion only deepened as the years went by, and eventually he went to study theology. At some point, he even got the chance to go on an exchange and spend several months studying in the United States.
M: That was in 2016. So you can imagine how fun staying in the United States was at that time during the first Trump election. And having seen everything that that brought to that society, I said, no, thank you. I think I'll just go back to Eastern Europe. To the familiar instability. I didn't enjoy the distance from home. I didn't enjoy how the society, not even the public space there is set up. Not going to say anything too bad about the country, but it just wasn't for me. That's it.
W: Just as he grew disillusioned with the American dream, he also realized that neither academia nor the Church offered a clear path where he could truly thrive. So Marko took a u-turn and decided to put his skills to use as a copywriter — and that’s where he is today, building a great career and genuinely enjoying his work.K: And so at some point you came home to Belgrade and then at some point after that, you decided to go to a protest for the first time. What was it that made you decide to do that?
Matija: Well, that was a time when the Belgrade Waterfront project was getting started and the project from its get go was mired in secrecy and shady dealings and corruption and the legal strong-arming to just push this undesirable project through.
W: Just for those not in the know, it’s this glitzy, almost Emirati-style urban makeover project that was supposed to turn the old riverbank into a modern district with upscale housing, office spaces and luxurious shopping areas. And it was one of Aleksandar Vučić's biggest promises back in the 2012 election. So how has that turned out?
M: Now it's just this eyesore, ugly part of the town that's unreasonably expensive. It seems to really be like a money laundering scheme. That incident is not the first incident that really was a poke in the eye for me, but it was, I think, the first bigger protest that I attended. The horrible, brutal abuse of the law, the way this whole thing was conducted. Because you see, under the guise of night, a number of masked individuals appeared. And if you can believe it, just the night after the election, they started razing these shanty buildings that were there. They tied up a night guard. Police were called, but they weren't responding. I mean, it was just such a horrible, horrible incident and it became clear to many, many people to see how just blatant this government, this regime was going to be when trying to push for their interests.
K: When we were talking before, you told us that you’ve taken part in various protests in Serbia over the years, and each of them was related to a kind of a disparate issue, right? But is there like one overriding frustration that ties all of these things together and makes you want to go out and protest?M: Behind all these issues is just the blatant corruption and incompetence of the government. That's I think what's hurting us all the most. I'm not, and many people here aren't, one-issue voters. We care about multiple things. I am not a ‘not people getting squished under buildings extremist’, you could say. I am extremely against that. I'm also against the horrible and brutal corruption when you mark up some public infrastructure and charge the public five times or 10 times more money. It's all the money that we can use for, I don't know, hospitals, education, anything really. I mean, I'm getting taxed for this money. So I don't want to see it so blatantly misused. We've had people close to the government, close to the regime, running people over in the streets or their children doing that and then getting away with it. There's a railway project going on that's supposed to connect Belgrade finally to Budapest. And it's supposed to be high-speed train ready, which, if you can imagine a train accident and what that could possibly mean, I mean, I'm just not that trusting with how they conducted previous projects. So I'm not sure I would be able to comfortably ride this train.
W: Yeah. And can you tell us a bit about how you're involved in this current wave of protests?M: Well, I did take part in almost everything that happened in Belgrade itself. Otherwise, I'm vocally online and in real life, very much so, supportive of the protests. I try to support them financially. Many people do. We had this practice of banging the pots and blowing our whistles every evening. There's all sorts of these things that one can do that are not really high effort, but that keep the energy high and ensures that everybody keeps the protests sort of in their mind. Even if they cannot attend the latest rally, even if they miss one or two, they can still keep in mind that, yes, we're still all in this together. We're still all thinking the same thing. We're still all involved.
K: Wojciech and I are talking to you from across this invisible border from within the European Union. Where are the EU in all of this? In the protest movement, but also just generally in terms of how they've dealt with Vučić and with Serbia over the recent years. How do you see that relationship?
M: For the most part, we see the role of the West as a negative, net negative in Serbia. It really seems like the West is quite willing to play along with any player here locally, so long as he's able to give them what they want, whatever that might be. If it's their companies moving to Serbia for some reason, good, he'll sign that. If it's lithium mining that maybe fits the energy interests of, I don't know, Germany or whichever country, fine, he'll do it. In that sense, we should not expect any kind of condemnation of Vučić. And I think it's a wrong idea to expect the EU to, like, remove Vučić or anything like that. It's not really their place to do it. I think of my country as a sovereign nation. I am a member of the political body. I have my vote. I have my strength to rebel if need be. And I would prefer that I choose my own government. I would prefer me to build my political system and then try to participate with other bigger players. Never, obviously, in an equal field. But I'm not looking for Serbia to become a vassal state. So in that sense, we're not really looking towards EU to, like, fix these problems for us. And we're not really expecting them to condemn Vučić. So far, they were quite tame in their criticisms.
CLIP: “The European Union remains impassive. Brussels supported protests in Georgia a few weeks ago, while in the case of Serbia it has barely blinked.”
The EU has this bureaucratic way of kind of cushioning things and Like using some legal euphemisms or something like that. And obviously, if they don't have any interest in pushing it further, then they won't. It'll all just stay these, like, vague proclamations, something they sign off on. And then they just kind of, like, forget about it. They just move on. In a week, everybody forgets about it.
K: And this current wave of protests have, I think, mostly been organized by students, right? Or certainly student-led. And these are kind of left-wing groups…
M: Mmm…
K: No? Am I wrong about that?
M: Well, first of all, yes, they were organized by the students. That's fair to say. Now, as far as left or right leaning, there is no clear-cut way to determine that. Some faculties are left-leaning, like, entirely. Others are right-leaning. For example, the Faculty of Law is kind of right-leaning. The Faculty of Philosophy is a little left-leaning. But entire departments or entire faculties can be left or right-leaning. But students as a whole group are, I would say, just kind of reflective of our entire society, slightly right-leaning. A little right-leaning. However, you should not apply any typical right-left reasoning here. Nothing that's informed by the United States politics in terms of right or left. Here, people mostly fall in the pro-EU, pro-NATO camp, and anti-NATO, anti-EU, anti-let's say imperialist, quote-unquote, camp. And that's the main divide here between the left and the right.
W: So tell us, what does it mean to be a right-leaning person in Serbia these days?
M: The right-wing would be anti-NATO, anti-imperialist, somewhat anti-EU. You could say that they like Russia. They like the sort of Slavic world. They're patriotic in that sense, I suppose. And you could say, to an extent, that the left-wing is pro-EU and to a minor extent even pro-NATO. Yeah, definitely joining EU has been a carrot that's been dangled in front of our faces. I mean, we're constantly in some sorts of negotiations. We're constantly being promised opening this, that or the other chapter. We're constantly being bombarded about this idea that it's just around the corner. We're about to open the next chapter. It's questionable to what degree people support it, even. And it's due to various reasons. It's not that we don't think of ourselves as Europeans, as a European country, as part of the European culture in some sense. It's more so that we're not often really enthralled by the bureaucracy, the bureaucratic apparatus of the European Union. We're wary of the Lithuanian and Bulgarian scenario, with a lot of people sort of leaving the country and our economy and everything getting sucked up by the bigger players in the EU. That's really not a scenario we're looking to suffer. The protesters distance themselves from any overt EU symbolisms. In that sense, the protests, I would say, are right-leaning. And EU flags are banned. There's been people who all throughout the protests tried to fly the European flags. Or I've seen Ukrainian flags. I've seen all sorts of flags. We've had student monitors, organizers remove these people and ensure that it's only the Serbian flag that's flying. That's the thing that we can all definitely unite under. And we should not try to separate or split up this body that we've been able to finally awaken. What you have to realize is that for the last several, several, quite a few elections, our voter turnout has been dropping.
K: Right. At the last national elections in 2023, the turnout was like 53% I think.M: So that's obviously not a healthy democracy. And you can obviously question the legitimacy of any government that comes after an election where, I don't know, they win 50% of the votes, but with 50% turnout, that's what, 25% of people voting for them. And they have more or less, like, total control of the government. It's ridiculous. But that's the situation we're in. So the protesters, the students were wise enough that despite their differences between, for example, the Faculty of Philosophy and maybe the Faculty of Law, and then maybe University of Belgrade versus University of Novi Sad, despite all these differences, I think they agreed on this kind of a middle ground with a slight, slight patriotic leaning. Even if I, for example, myself would prefer the protests to be more right-leaning, I entirely recognize and accept the fact that I need to unite with people who may not think exactly the same as I do, but there's a greater evil at hand to be defeated here. And then we can argue the finer details of our politics later on.
K: Do these protests feel different, materially different from previous ones that you have attended?
M: Yes, definitely. There are many ways in which they're different. First of all, they're decentralized. There is no clear organizer. Obviously, we talked about the students, but the students are a diverse, large body, group of people. Even when the student body would send some kind of a representative or a speaker to a TV show or something, I don't think they ever appear twice, so that there's no single person that can emerge as the face of the protest. The reason for that is that there's no clear line of attack for the government. If you scour any of our social media or of our history, if you talk to all of the people who ever knew us, you're going to find something, anything. And then you give it to media and they twist it and blow it up and suddenly you're the worst person in the world. So to avoid that line of attack and to avoid people co-opting the movement and projecting their own political preferences onto the entire body of the protests, they decided to decentralize them. I think that was, for the most part, a very good decision. Obviously, there are many issues with not having a face of the protests. Every movement needs a leader. It needs a recognizable face. It needs a speaker to articulate the values and the causes of the movement. So as the protests go on and as this thing develops, I think it's probably going to evolve into that direction in some sense. It could be the case, and I hope that's the case, that the students will always remain a decentralized force that's kind of slowly burning in the background, slowly just kind of eroding the regime lies and the entire system. And maybe, I don't know, the unions or other political actors or people in the kind of public sphere will start emerging as they show their support, as they act in these protests. We might get a new so-called political elite, which is what I would be hoping for. And then they would serve as a kind of a face to the protests. But we're still not in that phase, I think. Such a thing hasn't really happened. A few faces here and there have become quite recognizable, but it's far from widespread complete acceptance.
W: We've seen several protest movements fade away in the past couple of years, especially, I mean, the complete collapse of the opposition in the last year's Belgrade local election rerun, which, I know that felt like a hard gut-punch to a lot of your countrymen. Why do you think these current protests have shown such staying power?
M: These protests have had staying power precisely because they're decentralized, precisely because there is no such player. I myself am trusting that my time is not being wasted. I don't want to turn out to 10 rallies and waste 20, 30, 40 hours of my life, risk anything happening to me out there in the public, any confrontations with the police or masked individuals somewhere, just for some, really any of the existing opposition leaders to lay a claim to the protest and then try to basically raise their political image for the purposes of maybe getting a better placement in the next elections. We're all quite disillusioned with the opposition leaders. I vote every time. It's just, I think it's a civic duty.
And almost every time I voted, I don't think I was happy with the vote I was casting. It was just an approximation of what I would want. So, a lot of people are like that. A lot of people vote just because they don't want to vote for Vučić, and then a lot of people don't even turn out. And that's actually, that's how people get discouraged and stop even turning out to vote, because they don't have a candidate to vote for. And that's what disillusioned a lot of voters. And that's precisely why these protests do have such high energy and such high turnout, because we don't see those faces there. We see each other. It's all those people that you talk to at weddings or at meetings or at some family gatherings, and then you talk and share a political opinion. And it's like, oh, well, we all agree. So what's happening? Why is nobody articulating these opinions, these thoughts in the public sphere? Finally, these protests are something like that.
W: There have been some alarming reports of secret police involvement and violent acts. I even saw images of people being run over by cars. Do you feel safe out there? What's the general vibe of these rallies?
M: The vibe of the protests and the blockades is very, very positive. It's almost carnival-like. You could see families, people with small children, people taking their dogs to these protests. Not a lot of people, maybe occasionally, would wear gas masks and protections. I even wore one at the biggest protests on 15 March. And for the most part, we do feel safe. But you're right. There's a lot of provocations. There's always fears of secret agents, so to speak. I'm not necessarily implying that they are government employees, but maybe some criminal groups or something like that, who are kind of planted. And then they throw a rock or a bottle or something like that at the police. And suddenly, police have an excuse to move in and start breaking up the protest. Definitely, that was an issue. That was a fear. But what we've done with these protests, and I'm really, really happy that they thought of this, is that the veterans, the Serbian war veterans, some of them at least, have joined these protests and they have committed to protecting the students. So what they would do is they would usually form either a line or they would kind of hover near the edges of the protests. And they would immediately intercept anybody who is trying to incite violence, because that's what usually happens at the edge of protests or near government buildings. As soon as somebody throws something or starts yelling out these provocative, kind of cheap statements, you can kind of tell that they're looking for trouble. They will immediately show up and maybe they will apprehend them, because here in Serbia, we have this legal citizen's arrest. And they did that quite a few times, which is a very, very good thing, because we need the protests to stay mostly peaceful. Mostly peaceful. And thanks to their intervention and what the students did together with them, yes, we do feel safe. However, you're right, there were people getting run over by cars. It's just something that has been happening from pretty much day one. I would not ascribe every single of those incidents to Vučić. I think if you're going to have widespread protests involving many locations and many, many people, thousands and tens of thousands of people, obviously, obviously some fool somewhere is going to do something stupid. So a lot of those incidents with people maybe pushing somebody with a car or running somebody over, I would not say that that was organized by Vučić. However, what one might say is that it was encouraged by him. The way he spoke about it, the statements he's made in public about it, certainly imply a lack of care for the matter.
K: There's a group of people who I'm really interested in hearing about. From what I understand about the way that Vučić's kind of power base works and how he has managed to maintain this grip on power, one of the features I find really interesting is this idea of giving people, the SNS gives people benefits of various kinds in exchange for supporting them. Me, you know, my background is in Asia. This sounds to me like China kind of thing, like how the Communist Party operates. You might give people jobs in the public sector. You might give them contracts with public institutions or maybe their business licenses depend on the approval of local SNS leaders. That to me sounds very familiar from China. Are the protests trying to convince those people that there is something in it for them? Or is there just no hope in trying to reach those people?
M: I think you hit the nail on the head when you describe the way the system functions.
You're obviously familiar with it and clearly it's a well-developed system. Obviously, if you are holding the bag, so to speak, the budget of the state, the ideal situation strategically for you, and I'm not saying morally, but strategically, is to divide up all the goods, all the surplus to your supporters. And he's able to do that with impunity, without any sort of repercussions, because he has a total control of the government, of the legal system, everything is paralyzed. We do have these oversight agencies, we do have courts, we do have prosecutors, we do have laws. But if you have a minister who is blindly loyal to you and you alone, and obviously in on the whole thing, corrupt as you are, and if you have these prosecutors who are getting placed in these positions because they are kind of agreeable to the government, then despite all the proof, despite all the laws, the letters remain dead on the pages. There's nothing, there's no resolution to these things.
K: So are the protesters not even bothering trying to reach those people? Is it like, no point?
M: No, no, we are trying to reach them and we do reach them. What you have to realize is these are people like you and I. But if you want to find a job here in Serbia, you're faced with a difficult decision. You might have to compromise your integrity, you might have to enter this kind of deal with the devil and outwardly show support, kind of play along. Privately, you can think whatever you want. But you have to show up to their political rallies, you have to express your support online. You cannot express, either online or in real life, any strong support for the protests. And that's the game a lot of people have to play or forced to play. I don't want to show too much understanding to these people. It's, after all, a decision that they did make. It's not something that they absolutely necessarily have to do. It's still a choice. But I am understanding if you study to do something, if you have a certain skill set and you really want to do it, sometimes there is noble causes behind it in cases of, for example, some doctors. So the corruption is just deeply penetrating the entire government apparatus and it reflects people who work in the government and for the government. So we are trying to reach them, but there isn't really any hope that they will be able to join us before Vučić's downfall becomes quite apparent and draws much nearer.
W: And do you ever worry that these people, the ones supporting SNS and Vučić, actually are the majority and that they will cling to the current regime for as long as they can?
M: If you think about the whole electorate body and then the number of people who don't even turn out to vote, it's actually not all that many people. I mean, we have a hugely bloated state apparatus. It's a big problem. But still, it's not the majority. Still there's, still there is many more of us than them.
K: I've been swinging during this conversation, Marko, between thinking that, you know, you're convinced that change is coming and thinking that you think change is insurmountable. It's impossible to change. Which one is it? Do you think change is coming or not? Are you hopeful that change is coming?
M: Why not both? What's stopping us from holding two mutually exclusive thoughts in our mind?
K: Is that what it is to be Serbian, maybe?!
M: Yeah, I think it might be, yeah! Listening to myself even now, I'm trying to describe in this brief conversation the full complexity of what I and what we all feel. I'm trying to sort of balance what I personally feel and trying to represent us as a larger group. Yes, I think a difficult road is ahead of us. At various phases during these protests, we all were more so convinced of the near downfall of Vučić. The last big rally blockade thing that we had was on April 29th, when we held hostage the state radio and television buildings, actually two of them. And that went on for about, I think, two weeks or so. It was all in very high spirits. I mean, there was nothing they could do to us. The TV program was falling apart, basically. It really felt like we were doing something and we were ready to even escalate it further. But the students decided to call it off at some point. They felt like their demands, the reasons for that blockade, were kind of fulfilled, met. And so they disbanded the blockade and we all went our homes. Since then, there hasn't been that many mass protests. A few of them are happening these days outside of Belgrade. But we're all kind of waiting for the next big thing. I think when it happens and if they think of something good, which I kind of trust that they will, I think the turnout is going to be very, very large, because for the most part, they didn't disappoint people. Whoever I talked to isn't really disappointed in them. Maybe they're thinking that, oh, we didn't go far enough. Maybe on 15th of March, maybe we should have gone into the government buildings. Maybe we should have taken over the parliament, something like that. So they're more so ready to escalate rather than getting disappointed in some real sense by the students. So I do have a lot of faith that at least for the next thing that they think of, the turnout is going to be significant. What's going to happen after, it's difficult to know. Precisely because it's so decentralized, it's difficult to say who's really pulling the strings. In fact, it's probably multiple groups of people pulling the strings here. Universities trying to negotiate with each other what the next move is going to be and what the right political tone they want to choose. And then faculties within the universities. So it's just a clunky, clunky mess. And I don't blame them for taking a while, really. But what I am wary of and what you might be sensing is that I want the change to be real. I don't want to just replace this regime, this government with something slightly nicer, but more of the same thing. I don't want rampant corruption. I want the rule of law. I want to finally start moving forward. I want the quality of life to improve. So in that sense, at this time, it's not exactly 100% clear that that's what's going to happen. It's my hope. It's all of our hope. But we've been disappointed so many times before that it's just a real concern in our minds.
W: So looking ahead, what are you most afraid of when it comes to the possible outcomes of these protests?
M: Oh, well, one completely devastating outcome would be that nothing comes out of it. Basically, the blockades, the student body just kind of falls apart, normal functioning of the university resumes, there's no more protests. And what would happen then is, I guess, we would see mass firings, repression at these institutions. Vučić will not allow the same thing to happen twice. He will erode the autonomy of the university significantly. He will make sure that he puts his people in charge and in the right positions. So if we back down now, the backlash and the vengeance of Vučić against the university will ensure that it never happens again, or at least not in the near future. So all these people that we kind of rallied behind and kind of pushed in front of us and said, lead us, lead us, we agree with you, bravo, students, blah, blah, blah, blah, bravo, professors, we would kind of be letting them down. What that would mean for the rest of our society is that any other rebellion, any other standing up against this government would be even less likely. Because they would not want to meet the same fate of the university professors. University professors in any society are thought of as kind of very privileged. They are always a little more well-off than some other strata of society. If he can do this to them – what I assume he would do – if he can punish them that way, if he can fire them, if he can ostracize them, then nobody would dare raise their voice again. So the success of these protests might be the be-all and end-all for us.
If he survives this crisis, he's going to be smooth sailing for at least a few more years.
K: Well, listen, Marko, this has been an amazing conversation for helping us just to get behind the headlines and help us understand a little bit about what it actually feels like to be Serbian right now. So thank you for taking all of this time to speak to us. I have one final question that I would like to end on. Can you tell me one thing you love about Serbia and one thing that drives you absolutely crazy about Serbia?
M: Oh, okay, okay. If you thought it was confusing before, wait for that one. What I love and what I hate about Serbia and Serbians. I don't know. It's, you know, I love being a Serbian. It's the only way I am in this world. It's all I have ever known. I think it's a pretty good thing and I intend to keep being that. And I love my fellow Serbians. They often frustrate me to no end, frustrated that all of this hasn't happened sooner. But I also do understand it. You know, we've been through a lot. It's difficult to rile us up.
It's difficult to get us excited because we've been through a lot. So I hope things just start getting better for us. They have to. They have to.
K: I hope they do too. Thank you so much.
M: Thank you.
W: Thank you, Marko.
M: Thanks, guys.
K: This story was hosted by me, Katy Lee, and Wojciech Oleksiak, who also produced it and was responsible for scoring and sound design. Editorial support came from Morgan Childs, Dominic Kraemer and Katz Laszlo, with thanks to Nikola Radić for helping us to find Marko in the first place. Music came from Mobygratis and Epidemic Sounds. This story was produced in collaboration with Euronet+, the leading radio network for EU news. We’ll be back next week.
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