Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, has followed in Vladimir Putin’s footsteps this week by blaming popular protests on western meddling to discredit the opposition.
Protests over alleged vote rigging erupted in Belgrade after Serbia’s national and municipal elections on December 17. Vučić and his Serbian Progressive party (SNS) won an emphatic victory in the national poll, with 48 per cent of the vote to the opposition’s 24 per cent. But the results were closer in the Belgrade elections, where the SNS won only a few percentage points more than the opposition coalition, Serbia Against Violence (SPN).
The SPN has since refused to accept the election results in Belgrade, where it accuses the SNS of inflating the electoral register and bussing in voters from Republika Srpska in Bosnia to tip the election in its favour. The opposition staged two weeks of protests, culminating on Saturday when around 17,000 people took to the streets of Belgrade to demand the annulment of the elections.
The protest coincided with a partial re-run of the polls in 30 out of 8,000 polling stations – a token gesture by the government to defuse complaints about election fraud. When the SNS won an even larger majority, a jubilant Vučić claimed his party had been vindicated: ‘Today’s results are the resistance of ordinary people to the overthrow of the state! The people want to protect their country.’
The idea that the state is under threat fits with the narrative propagated by SNS officials that the protests are Serbia’s version of the Maidan uprising in Ukraine, which led to the ousting of the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. The SNS’s first reaction to the protests here was to declare that ‘Maidan won’t happen in Serbia’. After a protest at Belgrade city hall turned violent on December 24, President Vučić took to Pink TV, a pro-government channel, to suggest that foreign powers were trying to orchestrate a colour revolution in Serbia.
A few days later, Vučić told viewers why such attempts were doomed to fail: ‘It is not a problem if an NGO brings out fluorescent vests and backpacks, nor tent wings. It’s all written in the manuals of the colour revolutions. [But] you forgot something. In order to carry out the revolution, it is not enough, it is not technique or mathematics, politics is the essence and life…You cannot win power by force with such a small percentage of support.’
By invoking the narrative of ‘colour revolutions’, Vučić is seeking to de-legitimise the protests and appeal to widespread anti-western sentiment in Serbia. The same people who bombed Serbia in 1999 and who took Kosovo from Serbia are now trying to destabilise the country, or so the narrative goes.
As with the Kremlin, invoking Maidan is an old trick used by the Serbian authorities. Officials said the same thing about the large protests that erupted after two mass shootings in May 2023. These too were denounced as an attempted ‘colour revolution’ and Vučić vowed to prevent ‘Euromaidan’ in Belgrade.
Pro-Russian sentiment is prevalent in Serbia. The Serbian daily, Politika, recently thanked Russia for exposing ‘the West’s plans for Maidan in Belgrade’. It claimed that ‘Western centres of power… do not like Serbia’s international position…which is that there is no recognition of the so-called Kosovo, no change in policy towards friendly countries, towards Russia, China, the collective South’.
In an interview with Sputnik and Russia 24, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov argued that Serbia was paying a price for not doing the West’s bidding: ‘Join the sanctions against Russia, give Kosovo away, recognise its independence, and then we will accept you in the EU. And if not, they try to organise a coup.’
While the opposition may have appealed to the EU to not recognise the election results, there is no evidence that the West is interested in regime change in Serbia. The US ambassador to Serbia, Christopher Hill, has called on the opposition ‘to respect the will of the people as expressed in the ballot box’ and has denounced the violence that occurred on December 24th.
Unlike Maidan, these protests are unlikely to bring about regime change. The demonstrations in Belgrade have been small, even compared with those that followed the mass shootings of 2023. A majority of people in Serbia continue to support President Vučić and the SNS. And even if there is electoral fraud, it is difficult to argue away the government’s 22-point lead in the national poll.
The onus is now on the opposition to move beyond its purely negative critique of the ruling elite. It must gain broader support from the electorate beyond its core base in Belgrade. And it needs to do the hard work of building an alternative for Serbia, without asking western politicians to take sides – a futile plan in a country that is generally suspicious of the West.
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