It was like a scene out of a movie: a tense parliamentary meeting interrupted by opposition party lawmakers who launched smoke grenades, threw eggs and lit incendiary flares before unfurling a banner announcing “Serbia has risen to bring down the regime.” When the literal smoke cleared, at least three Serbian lawmakers were injured, including one who allegedly suffered a stroke during the chaos.
This week’s dramatic melee in Belgrade is just one moment of unrest amid a months-long protest movement that has shaken the Balkan nation. The protests began in the wake of a November railway disaster that killed 15 people in the city of Novi Sad, an incident that became a galvanizing moment for those who demanded accountability for the supposed cronyism and corruption they blamed for the tragedy.
What happened this week?
Tuesday’s chaotic legislative session, ostensibly called to “vote on a bill to increase university funding,” ended up “highlighting” Serbia’s “deep political divisions,” The Independent said. The violence began after party members accused the Serbian Progressive Party, which leads the ruling coalition and approved Tuesday’s legislative agenda, of “planning to approve dozens of other decisions” during the session, The Associated Press said. They also demanded lawmakers “first confirm the resignation of Prime Minister Milos Vucevic and his government.” Vucevic had announced his resignation in January under pressure from the growing protest movement, which described his abdication as “an attempt by the president to deflect blame — a tactic he has used to defuse past crises,” CNN said. Opposition party protesters also “used pepper spray and threw bottles at cabinet ministers” during Tuesday’s fracas, said Bloomberg, although the parliamentary session later resumed “despite chants from some legislators.”
How did Serbia get here?
The current protest movement began after the roof of a newly renovated train station in the city of Novi Sad collapsed, killing 15 people. Protesters have attributed the infrastructure failure to “corruption they link to President Aleksandar Vucic’s decade in power,” Reuters said. To date, 13 people have been charged in connection to the collapse.
While initially launched by student groups as a series of silent vigils for the Novi Sad victims, “teachers, farmers and other workers” have since joined the movement, which has become “the biggest threat yet” to Vucic’s presidency. Student protesters have largely “kept their distance” from more aggressive protests — such as Tuesday’s parliamentary action — in which “citizens in local communities opted for radicalization,” said Germany’s Deutsche Welle. Although the protests have been minimized in much of the American press, they are a “historic development worth paying attention to,” given the broader context of “Europe-wide backsliding on democracy and a crisis of the political establishment,” said Sasa Savanovic at Al Jazeera.
What could happen next?
Serbian protesters are preparing for a general strike on March 7, followed by a large demonstration in Belgrade on the 15th. The country’s ruling coalition has accused Western nations of “trying to destabilize Serbia” and “topple the government by backing the protests,” Reuters said. “Whether intentionally or not,” said political scientist Cvijetin Milivojevic to Deutsche Welle, “the opposition fell for the bait that the current government has been using for a long time.”