[This is an op-ed by Kori Udovicki, head of the Belgrade think-tank CEVES. She is a former minister in Serbian governments under Prime Ministers Zoran Djindjic and Aleksandar Vucic, former Governor of the National Bank of Serbia, and Regional Director for Europe and CIS for the UN development agency UNDP.]
The EU should recognise the justice of their cause; supporting them could help Serbia make a historic leap while winning over sceptical Serbian hearts.
The protests were sparked by the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad on November 1, killing 15 people. The station had been recently renovated under opaque infrastructure contracts – mainly including companies from Serbia and China, but reportedly also from France and Hungary – awarded under a credit agreement with China.
The government’s attempt to downplay the tragedy and intimidate grieving students backfired, fuelling a wave of peaceful demonstrations across the country.
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The [Serbian] regime’s reckless institutional abuse and blatant criminality exceed culturally acceptable norms on both sides of the divide, but the institutional hollowing did not happen overnight. Vucic rose to power promising to fight corruption. Initially he seemed to be delivering, at least on securing macroeconomic stability and some growth, as his methods of attracting FDI [Foreign Direct Investment] accelerated and oiled the economic machinery.
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Only 15 per cent of the much-trumpeted high level of FDI inflow is now into manufacturing; half of it goes into construction and real estate (unknown from where) and into mining (money from China). Public services keep being degraded under cynical mismanagement. In 2021, the failure of Serbia’s largest thermal power plant, following years of neglect, cost Serbia 2-3 per cent of its GDP. No one was held accountable.
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This de facto institutional implosion happened while the regime was “perfecting” its European regulatory credentials, dotting the i’s in its regulations, under the EU’s watch. Partly, this is because the EU’s transformation mechanisms – focused on regulatory compliance – are not equipped to address the deeper problem of governance parallelism, a legacy of Yugoslavia’s “self-management” model.
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The EU must now put its money where its mouth has long been. For years, it has championed the rule of law in Serbia. Now the Serbian people are demanding it.
This is not about supporting regime change, nor is regime change in the EU’s remit. This is about this movement’s potential to bring about profound change of the kind that Brussels cannot accomplish alone, even with EU accession. If enough institutional actors start adhering to the legal script, the rest will follow. The EU should at least start helping by simply recognising that the students’ demands align with its own principles.
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Not exactly accurate - the student protests are aligned with the opposition to Vucic, but the opposition is so incompetent, rather than taking the leadership role or supporting the protests directly, they're mostly sitting at the side lines and cheering.
Already happened, but the government says so much shit that nobody really cares.