The sixth protest of “Serbia against violence” was held last Friday, in an event that is now becoming a weekly occurrence and that keeps getting larger and more determined. This series of protests make up the largest and most meaningful public demonstrations since the protests that resulted in the removal of Slobodan Milošević from office in 2000. There are multiple indications that Vučić has been caught off guard, was unprepared for the massive scale of public revulsion, and that his regime is resorting to a number of desperate measures to maintain its position.
Vučić's habitual response to protests has been to dismiss the people behind them either as foreign agents or as extremists, and when necessary to stage counterprotests drawing on the regime's access to employees of public agencies and of private companies dependent on political patronage. The tactic generally succeeds when the protest is oriented toward a particular isue or incident, but it is failing now. The tactic failed once before, when large scale protests were organized against a set of environmentally destructive plans by the Rio Tinto mining corporation. In that instance the weakness of the regime derived from the scope of the opposition to it, which began with concern over the potential desruction of a river but expanded into an expresion of concerns that encompassed quality of life, the connection of the population to the physical space of the country, and alarm at the perception that the rulers of the state were so thoroughly dismissive of the public interest.
This time too the regime finds itself incapable of delivering an adequate or persuasive response. This is because the protests have expanded from their initial demand that the officials whose negligence encouraged the violence be held accountable, and grown into a protest that resonates with complaints about the authoritarian character of political rule, dissatisfaction with life conditions, and the atmosphere of fear and violence that is promoted both by media sources (a steady menu of violent entertainment) and official outlets (promotion of ethnic and national hatred). The great sociologist C Wright Mills once described the domain of sociology as “the intersection of biography and history,” and this intersection is being crossed with heavy traffic in this particular political moment.
As a consequence we have seen the regime responding desperately. One measure of how afraid the regime feels is the degree of correspondence between quality of media outlet and viciousness of propaganda. On any given day the propaganda coming from kitsch television stations (like “Pink” and “Happy”) and cheap tabloid papers (Informer and its siblings) will be utterly vile. But the official state broadcaster RTS and the newspaper of record Politika generally stay pretty circumspect and calm – until they do not. In the past several weeks the “respectable” regime-controlled media have displayed a level of rabble rousing and personal attacks equivalent to the pulp media. This happens occasionally, and it means that a mobilization has been ordered from above. Some of the action is in fact coming directly from above, including not very creative namecalling by the president himself, and a series of attacks and threats against popular actors designed to discourage celebrities from enhancing the popularity of the protests.
Similarly there have been noises about resignations (at least on the part of the wholly dispensible prime minister Brnabić) and about elections. Vučić's entire personnel strategy is designed to allow him to offer resignations by appointing people who have no political following independent of him, so he can repeat this trick as frequently as he likes at no cost. Also with regard to elections, the monopoly of SNS means that elections can be held very often with very little risk of losing. A sign of Vučić's fear of elections this time around is that he has started trying to buy votes before any election has even been called. He accompanied his discussion of elections with an announcement that the price of bread would be lowered and that all families with children under the age of 16 would receive a cash payment.
Does the repeated flinching of the regime tell us anything about the future? It might be observed that some semblance of democratic consciousness has awakened. But this has happened before. When the democratic consciousness awakens, it looks around and finds that the opposition political parties are useless and the internationals are holding on to their infatuation with Vučić, so it makes a reasonable assessment of its prospects, rolls over, and goes right back to sleep.