“When someone says ‘Europe!’ to me… I instantly hear the distant thunder of cannons. And I see our homes—burning.”

— Derviš Sušić, “Mother”

“When it was to befall the land of Serbia” this past spring, it was not merely so that the institutions of a legal state might do their jobs. It instead opened the deeper question of whose interests they actually serve—if not those of the citizens and the people, that is, of a just society—then whose? Who sets the rules of political engagement in Serbia, where for three decades, comprador elites have worked for others and stolen for themselves?

In short, it cast light upon the more anonymous, systemic corruption of the post-privatisation pashalik, where the SNS’s well-paid experts serve as glorified clerks, and street-level thugs as guard dogs. Here, one dinar of investor profit—greased with public subsidies—is held sacred, while the lives of those same citizens, waiting for transport to work last autumn in Novi Sad, are worth nothing at all.

The vassalage of Vučić’s bankrupt autocracy is evident not only in Russian intelligence reports or boasts in the Jerusalem Post about arms dealings with the Tel Aviv and Kyiv juntas, but perhaps most clearly in a little-noticed event: this month’s joint military drill between the Serbian Army and NATO forces, Platinum Wolf, held at the Jug base near Bujanovac. The exercise included advanced training in counterinsurgency, with Western experts instructing Serbian soldiers in the suppression of civil unrest.

The fact that the EU has listed the so-called Jadar Project among its strategic priorities ought to serve as a rude awakening from the petit-bourgeois sleepwalk toward Brussels—where, let us not forget, just this April, Dutch police were beating and unleashing dogs on pro-Palestinian students. The tired maxim that “Europe has no alternative” and that the European path is somehow a matter of “values” rather than a racket imposed on candidate countries, can no longer coexist—within a single breath—with the resistance rising in the Podrinje and Jadar regions against mining tycoons. That struggle, by the looks of it, will have to be waged on the banks of the Ibar, not in Strasbourg.

Otherwise, the Serbian student movement can no longer call itself either student-led or of the people; it loses all historical continuity—with ’68, with the Athens Polytechnic uprising of 1973, with the anti-imperialist, anti-comprador revolt against the Shah in 1979, and with the current global youth uprising against the genocidal campaign in Gaza, now blockading campuses from New York to Berlin.

The so-called “Young Serbian” movement—first and foremost a constitutional-patriotic initiative led by students—never separated means from ends: the self-organized, directly democratic plenums were not ad hoc instruments, but life itself, the heart and soul of the movement. They were what granted it a lasting democratic character—a capacity for learning from its own mistakes and a vitality and unity that endured despite the shared goal of figures ranging from Slobodan Antonić to Stevan Filipović: to weaponize the ideological and identity diversity of the students against them.

This is why a decisive effort had to be made to draw a clear line against the parliamentary, yet non-state-building, opposition—whose quarrel with Vučić is purely aesthetic. That opposition has been co-opted into his PR orbit for the sole purpose of diverting the Serbian public from contemplating any real alternative—just as the DOS derivatives, despite the socioeconomic disasters they caused, managed to ride the wave of fear of a return to Šešeljism and the isolation of the 1990s.

By unanimously resolving, alongside the continuation of social struggle, to support the only democratically acceptable outcome to this “Serbian rhapsody”—participation in elections, monitored as closely as possible by student observers, and a candidate list composed of trade unionists, farmers, professors, non-parliamentary opposition, and activists with indisputable public trust, such as the collective Housing Is a Human Right (Združena akcija Krov nad glavom), through a so-called “social front” strategy—the movement is taking a risky but courageous step back into the beastly den of an undemocratic electoral system.

To date, perhaps the most fitting metaphor for this act was coined by the editor of this very portal: once again, the systemic stone has been lifted, revealing all manner of political reptiles slithering in the scramble for power. And yet, despite the wintry confusion surrounding the smokescreen of a so-called expert/technocratic government at the height of the movement’s mass mobilization, many believe that the (admittedly late) call for snap elections does nothing to diminish the achievements or internal integrity of the student struggle so far.

The ongoing articulation of the student list’s programmatic minimum will be the true test of whether any political force within the semi-peripheral Balkans can finally offer more than sterile anti-corruption rhetoric and endless culture wars. For now, even the successful student-led campaign—imposed upon the complacent, yellow-vested unions—for amending the current Labour Law marks a meaningful step forward. That law neatly encapsulates the full legacy of Serbian-style neoliberalism: from its founding under Šešelj, through what Molnár refers to as a two-year period of Euro-messianic authoritarianism under “Zoran’s Vision,” to the marketing-technocratic hybrid of both demagogues—Disneyland Vučić.

After all, the right to protest without penalties in the workplace is a far stronger incentive for democratization than performative, moralizing discourses about “changing the national mindset.”

In any case, if one were to write the history of this region in the year 2050—especially from the perspective of more subordinated societies like North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, or even Montenegro—Serbia will, true to its two-century tradition, surely be recorded and remembered as a solitary but radiant star that, upon a geopolitically darker-than-ever sky, rose with an authentic democratic movement.

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