📩 Is change coming to Serbia?

DEAR READER,

Last week, we attended the Kościuszko Forum in Gdańsk, organised within Poland’s EU Presidency (and inaugurated on Tadeusz Kościuszko’s birthday). The forum focused on Belarus’ future, and was attended by the Belarusian activists and representatives of democratic circles, including Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. The forum emphasised efforts to strengthen democratic resilience in Belarus, and, as noted by Polish FM Radosław Sikorski, challenged Putin’s false narrative of Belarus being part of Russia.

On a different note, we have a couple of announcements. We have just launched the call for the third edition of the New Eastern Europe Think Tank School. This program is designed for young (up to 30 years old) aspiring researchers, academics, and students based in the EU who are eager to learn about the role of think tanks in building resilient democracies. The application deadline is February 14, 23:59 CET — do not miss out!

We are also conducting surveys for New Eastern Europe and Talk Eastern Europe to get your feedback on our 2025-2030 strategy. As a thank you, three participants will be randomly selected to receive a free 1-year subscription to New Eastern Europe. The survey closes on February 17.

Finally, in this week’s expert opinion, we will be diving into the ongoing protests in Serbia. We’ve asked Alexandra Karppi, Western Balkans expert and co-host of the Talk Eastern Europe podcast, to provide an in-depth analysis on the situation and what to expect in the coming days.

Enjoy reading this week’s “brief”!

— Giorgi Beroshvili, Editor

Truly historic protests are underway in Serbia. Tens of thousands of protesters throughout the country have gathered every day for the last three months. Protesters are demanding accountability from their government, which they hold responsible for the death of 15 citizens after a railway station canopy collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad last fall. Rightfully so, protesters point to endemic corruption and poor rule of law as the cause of these tragic deaths and are demanding that documents about the reconstruction of the railway station be publicly released. Even with the resignation of several officials, including the prime minister, protesters have not stepped down.

What makes these protests different from those in recent years is not just their scale, but the whole-of-society mobilisation that is underway. While ostensibly organised by Serbian students across the country, every segment of society has joined the protests, from farmers and lawyers to children and pensioners. The grassroots nature of the protests is also “new”, with students working collectively through direct democracy to plot their next move. Opposition leaders and even Serbia’s robust civil society are second to the youngsters when it comes to bringing citizens out to protest.

This grassroots, society-wide mobilisation is undermining the regime’s usual tactics of quelling mass protests: strategically ignoring them until they fizzle out, invoking imagined enemies to make protests look like an external threat rather than a genuine expression of grievances, and planting “hooligans” to stir up violence and discredit peaceful protesters. Though President Aleksandar Vučić has already tried all three of his usual plays, they simply are not working. The protests have become too large and too widely supported to ignore, and the lack of a single face behind the effort has made the government’s smearing, scapegoating, and harassing of activists ineffective. Revelations of violence against protesters by ruling-party affiliated gangs have only made citizens angrier.

So, what comes next?

Vučić will not step down as president. Although he floated the idea of holding an “advisory referendum” on his presidency to the opposition weeks ago, the parties and protesters both snubbed this. And, to put it plainly, Vučić is no Bidzina Ivanishvili. He can’t puppeteer the country without a formal position. Despite his hold on power in Serbia, Vučić — as it stands now — is still constrained by his electorate. Even more critically, Vučić relies more heavily on the support of the EU and the US than Ivanishvili ever did, and Vučić cannot curry their favor without holding office.

Most likely, Vučić will try to wait out the protests by distracting citizens from the country's repeated governance failures with smoke and mirror policy changes. We may see additional changes at the top or boosts to pensions, public sector salaries, and unemployment as possible red herrings. And, any day now, the ruling party will decide whether to trigger yet another round of extraordinary elections following the prime minister's resignation. Vučić has a history of calling snap elections to deter the public and reset the political playing field. Still, doing so when polling suggests waning support for his party — and so soon after fraudulent elections in 2023-2024 sparked its own wave of outcry — could be risky for the government.

But there’s another, more dangerous scenario if Vučić continues stoking covert violence against protesters. Some sort of escalation of violence in the streets — to be clear, instigated by Vučić’s hooligans and not by protesters — could force a political reckoning in Serbia, one that could go either way for democracy and security. An overtly violent clash, with the potential need for a crackdown by Serbian authorities, is a scenario that Vučić has tried to avoid at all costs, as not to upset his delicate balance of friendships in Brussels, Washington, and Moscow. But, if any sort of violence snowballs, Vučić may be left exposed. In this worrying scenario, everything comes down to the reaction by the West, whether it will act swiftly enough to clap back against the government and, crucially, whether it will continue pressuring the government in the long term to give Serbian citizens a shot at real reform. The alternative is a Belarus-like situation, in which this moment puts more lives at risks and leads to a deepening of autocratic repression against Serbian society — a transformation that some analysts suggest is already underway.

Student-led protests are an important reminder that there is still ardent demand for democracy in Serbia. This means that change is coming to Serbia, it’s just a matter of when. These historic protests have upended Vučić’s usual plays and are pushing the country towards an inflection point. The question is not when this reckoning will come, but what costs it could have for protesters, activists, and Serbian society writ large under an increasingly autocratic regime. But this is also an opportunity for international actors, whose support to Serbian citizens in their demands for accountability could help avoid a regional security crisis.

— Alexandra Karppi, Specialist in the Western Balkans

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