The first anniversary of the Novi Sad railway station roof collapse accident that claimed 16 lives on November 1, 2024 is being celebrated in a dynamic way.
Since then the protest, which is part of the global mobilizations of Generation Z and in Serbia, has attracted broad sections of the people who are dissatisfied with the personal nature of the regime of President Aleksandar Vučić, who has brought under his control the most important institutions of Serbian society, removing democratic safeguards.
For today’s anniversary, marches are organized in multiple parts of Serbia with “all roads leading” to Novi Sad. The 90 kilometers between Belgrade and Novi Sad is the focus of a procession of thousands of people with a quasi-religious litany of pilgrimage in memory of the dead. The most determined have started from Novi Pazar over 350 kilometers away.
The long collective marches recall dramatic moments from the history of Serbia during the times of dual occupation of the country by the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. Now the issue is freedom from corruption and the regime.
The interpretation of this social phenomenon is complex. In the dominant discourse of the Vucic government, this is a pro-Western “color revolution” linked to a plan to destabilize Serbia. However, the demonstrations are not dominated by pro-Western slogans, but more by patriotic ones, although the movement is diverse and houses a wide range of ideological orientations with an emphasis on non-dependence on any parliamentary force.
“The secret of the movement is its hyperpersonal character,” writer and journalist Vladislav Bayacs explains to Vima. “When there is no specific leader person who can be targeted and neutralized, then power is disarmed and awkward.”
And according to Davor Jalto, a professor at the University of Stockholm specializing in Political Philosophy, the “secret of success is the non-hierarchical character of the movement, the importance of decentralized consultations inspired by the tradition of self-management and anarcho-syndicalism, without necessarily having the Yugoslav “label”, or even Serbian communalism. Of course, youth communities are now hybrid: in the squares, on the streets, on the highways, but also on online platforms,” he tells Vima.
Countervailing forces
However, Serbia is not an isolated island. Bosko Bojović, professor emeritus of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, Director of Research at the Institute of Balkan Studies and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and Professor at the European Center for Peace and Development (ECPD) in Belgrade, emphasizes speaking to Vima that we cannot see what is happening in Serbia independently of similar phenomena in other countries.
“There is a destabilization happening in Serbia that is not independent of what we see in other geopolitically critical regions, such as in the Caucasus countries. The movements taking place in Serbia need to be studied together with what is happening in all the countries that are at a critical juncture in the region from the Western Balkans to the Caucasus and not just by internal social criteria as if Serbia is isolated”.
“Certainly, the fight against corruption is a Palladian request that explains the initial dynamism of the movement. However, the suggestion that a youth movement can be instrumentalized also causes concern in a large part of society. From one point onward, the dynamics of the movement meet countervailing forces, such as the fear of a part of society that there will be exploitation of the youth movement in the direction of an upheaval that may end up in uncontrollable destabilization. Potentially, it would be worth studying the Serbian movement in comparison even with youth movements that occur in very distant geographical areas, e.g. in Nepal, Madagascar or Morocco, as there may be similar methods of mobilizing the new generation through online technology, even if we are talking about countries with very different cultures,” concludes Professor Bojović.
