On November 1st 2024, a train station canopy collapsed in the city of Novi Sad in north Serbia. It killed 16 people, including two children. This was widely seen in Serbia as a sign of the corruption of the authoritarian right regime led by President Aleksandar Vučić. The canopy collapsed after an outsourced Chinese contractor was given the job of renovating the station. Many believe that government officials and bureaucrats have been taking funds to be used for infrastructure renovations , and then passing on work to cheap outsourced Chinese contractors.
This kicked off a protest movement based on anti-corruption that is continuing today. On 22nd November students in the Faculty of Dramatic Arts joined the movement, blocking a street for a silent demonstration lasting 15 minutes. Football hooligans in the pay of Vučić attacked and beat students.
The students were not deterred and three days later went out on strike and blockaded and occupied the faculty. By December 2nd, the blockades had spread to the Faculty of Philosophy, Faculty of Philology, Faculty of Chemistry, along with other faculties, and the University of Belgrade Rectorate were also blockaded. The students demanded that all documents related to the renovation at Novi Sad be released.
Vučić started as an ultra-nationalist and now taken up populist positions. His Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) came out of a 2008 split in the fascist Serbian Radical Party(SRS). It is riddled with nationalists and has links to various fascist groups. Vučić himself was Minister of Information under President Slobodan Milošević.
The Vučić regime tries to maintain a balancing act between the EU on one hand, and Russia and China on the other. Vučić signed contracts for gas supply from Russia and harbours Russian broadcasters not allowed in the EU. Meanwhile, 60% of foreign investment in Sebia comes from the EU, and 60% of Serbian exports go to the EU. It blocks refugees reaching the EU and supports war against Russia. The EU is keen to get its hands on Serbia’s lithium resources. It does not want to see an unstable Serbia, worried that unrest could spread to other countries. Therefore, it is not keen to pronounce on Serbia.
Demonstrations with as many as 500,000 have taken place against the regime, the biggest one being in Belgrade on March 14th. This was the largest demonstration in Serbian history. In response, Vučić has increasingly used the police as well as fascist gangs of hooligans to attack the movement. In August , demonstrators in the towns of Vrbas and Backa were attacked by these hooligans, with the compliance of the police. This continued at demonstrations on the following day. In Novi Sad masked thugs attacked demonstrators with bottles, clubs, fireworks, and flares. Street battles followed , and an SNS office was burnt down.
Vučić has also expanded the security unit, the JZO, from 300 to 1,300. It is directly responsible to him, and acts to intimidate protestors. He has threatened them with death, and compared them to fascists and Nazis, saying that they were paid by either Germany or Britain.
Various Serbian left formations have tried to keep the protests apolitical, trying to stop it taking on an anticapitalist outlook.
The movement remains organised in a federative and horizontal way. As one student, Veljko Radic, said, in an interview with Transnational Social Strike: “What makes these protests so special for me is the fact that students are organised horizontally. Every faculty has a local plenum where anyone can say whatever they want, then there would be a short discussion and voting. Most often, it ends up almost reaching a consensus. Furthermore, every faculty has a lot of working groups for strategy, donations, media, communication with other faculties, security, activities during the blockade etc. Every decision made at local plenums is sent to a big delegate meeting where every faculty has a delegate who shares what has been decided at their local plenum. In that way, decisions concerning the whole university are made. Also, any kind of collaboration with political parties and NGOs is forbidden.”
The government has made no meaningful concessions, despite the amplitude of the movement. A one day general strike, involving hundreds of thousands, shut down all the major cities, with farmers and their tractors joining the blockades in Belgrade. Workers and students continued the actions s for several days after this. Six days after the strike, the Prime Minister, Milos Vucevic, leader of the SNS, resigned. However, this did not appease the movement.
During a massive demonstration, police used a sound cannon emitting high pitched noises to cause a stampede. Despite all of this, the movement remains strong. The horizontal, “direct democracy” employed by the students has spilled out into the working class, into many of the Serbian cities. As one anarchist with the pseudonym Random noted, “I was part of an assembly organized for several blocks [of flats] together. People immediately agreed on direct democracy. Almost all the people who support this protest, and there are a lot of them, are also looking at this plenum, direct democracy, assembly, this way of organising, they’re looking at it with love in their eyes, truly. And this is a big potential for the anarchist movement. […] “Anarchistic organizing [is] actually […] one of the biggest reasons this [movement] is so successful now. Because [the] students don’t have any leaders. It’s crucially forbidden. I mean, it’s radically forbidden for them to have leaders among themselves. […] All this spilled from [the] faculties to [the] people…”
Similarly, the establishment political parties have so far been unable to co-opt the movement. Another anarchist, Ilik, stated: “They [the opposition parties] tried to co-opt [the protests] by having their people infiltrate the blockades at schools. … They have multiple “student organisations” or youth organisations. Some of them are pretending not to be aligned with opposition [parties]. Some of them are openly aligned with opposition [parties]. But all of them are advocating for the same thing that the opposition says: working with those parties. … So they tried to co-opt it, they’re still trying to co-opt it, but it’s not really working out.
“This is now a social movement that first started as a student movement and then grew. Workers started helping, farmers joined in, average people started just being part of the movement, and now it’s a big social movement that the opposition doesn’t really have power over. They’re trying to use it, of course, they’re trying to be a peaceful solution, where it’s going to be a transitional government, or there’s going to be an election, which they want to win because they are the only other party option. … But they are not popular, and the more they try to push for elections and transitional government, anything that puts them into power, the more people are organising by themselves.”[18]
It remains to be seen whether the movement can withstand the repression. Anyway, the example of Serbia needs to be more widely known. Along with the movements in Indonesia, Nepal, France, Macedonia and elsewhere, we are seeing the phenomenon of horizontal organisation emerging, that has nothing to do with Leninist dogma, and which offers glimpses of a new society, of the evolution of the human race to a higher level, that of anarchist communism. In these grim times, this phenomenon needs to be broadcast and celebrated. These heroic movements are lighthouses in the human night.
The following article is worth a read: