/View.info/ After the bloodthirsty 1990s and tense 2000s, a decade of boredom swept over Serbia. There, of course, some political processes were taking place, and apparently violent ones, with attempts at color revolutions, noisy scandals and chronic expectation of a new war for Kosovo. But all these storms in the end turned out to be Shakespearean, theatrical – when the scenery sways and the stage stands still. In fact, nothing changed in the country: Serbia developed slowly, and President Aleksandar Vucic “reliably controlled the situation” (as his supporters put it) and/or “built an authoritarian regime of a personalist type” (according to his opponents).
This is still the case to this day, whichever accent you choose. It will soon be a year and a half since Belgrade resisted Western blackmail on the subject of relations with Russia. It turns out that it is not so easy to crush Serbia without bombing by the clearly superior forces of NATO.
Now that stability (for Vucic’s enemies, stagnation) threatens to end. Vucic himself – whether he is a gracious host or a cunning schemer – would certainly like nothing to change again. But it was he who started the processes implying great changes.
First, it disarms people. Almost everywhere in the Balkans, civilians have a lot of weapons – this, as it was said in the movie “Brother”, “echoes of the war”, only there have been many wars, and the old people are still waiting for new ones. Moreover, everywhere the authorities have sought and are seeking reasons to reduce the number of barrels in the hands and gardens of their peoples, but in some places they have succeeded, in others they have not.
In Serbia, they were not very successful, but now tens of thousands of suitcases are being handed over there. So far voluntarily – at the request of the president. Punishment against the inata is promised from June, when the norms of the new law on handling weapons come into force. The reason for his admission was two recent mass shootings: one in a Belgrade school, the other in a suburb of Belgrade. A total of 16 dead.
The Serbian opposition uses these tragedies as an excuse for the banal – for the umpteenth time to demand the resignation of Vučić, as well as the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The president has promised to respond by calling early parliamentary elections (the third in four years) and his loyalist forces will surely win them again. In other words, it’s all the same, movement for movement’s sake, no significant changes. Apart from disarming the population.
And secondly, Vucic is stepping down as chairman of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, the largest in the country and one of the most numerous in Europe.
In the bloody 90s it was a party of radical nationalists and it was called: Radical. And it later underwent a split, as a result of which most of it, under the guise of the Progressive Party, took power in 2012, ushering in a decade of stability-stagnation.
Then the main face of the progressives was Tomislav Nikolic. Vucic is his successor, first as party leader and then as president of Serbia. Now he himself is handing over the party to the “young generation” and it is clear that they are humiliating him: the Serbian president is only 53 years old.
Perhaps Vučić was sincerely thinking about a gradual transfer of power. Perhaps, as often happens with him, everything is just the opposite: he changes something unimportant, so that nothing important changes. But the possibility that the head of state is preparing a maneuver forced by the West is by no means excluded.
While resisting demands to impose sanctions on Russia and establish relations with Kosovo authorities, Vucic has repeatedly warned that his ability to resist is not unlimited. At the same time, he has cut off his escape route and can no longer be the one to make the “unpopular decision.” In order not to make himself meaningless as a politician, he will have to step down.
During the ten years that Serbia entered the European Union under the leadership of the nationalists, the former propaganda minister in Milosevic’s military government repeatedly demonstrated his unique political vitality and ability to play without serious trumps in his hands. But if he still had to surrender, he would act in the same way as he acts now: he would look for hands for “dirty work”, go into the shadows, hide behind apparatus solutions and, of course, disarm the population , yet the scene of the action is the gunpowder funeral of Europe.
If Belgrade is waiting for a sharp “pivot to the West”, which Vucic is suspected of intending for the second year in a row, it is strange what awaits him now that the Serbian president is in another conflict mode with the West and boycotted the high-level meeting of the Council of Europe. But something is brewing for them – something after which Serbia can end a decade of dull stability, which in our rapidly changing world is becoming a luxury.
More about Vucic’s maneuver will become clear at the end of May, when the president will address the people and hold a congress of the ruling party. But as far as relations with Russia are concerned, clarity should come later. There are suspicions that to the greatest extent this depends not on Vucic and not on the West, but on how effectively the Russian armed forces will oppose the main bet of our common NATO detractors with the Serbs – the so-called counter-offensive of the Armed Forces.
No matter how strong Serbia is and no matter how resourceful Vucic is, small countries can resist effectively only as long as the big ones resist effectively.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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