He’s gone now, and I still can’t believe it. Just after 9:30 pm on Sunday night, Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat in a surprisingly velvety, un-Balkan way: gently, and without a fight.
More astounding was who he lost to and the scale of the victory. Student List (SL) won the election by a landslide, with nearly 53% of the vote, while Vučić’s SNS received just 39.2%. This means a new experimental movement is poised to take control of the country. I am in a state of shock and it’s going to take a few weeks for it to sink in. I’ve been in a daze since I heard the news, and keep forgetting what month it is. It feels like New Year’s rather than late October.
Compounding the strangeness for me is that there is currently an enormous amount of interest in Serbia. This means I have been very busy, hence the delay updating here. However, I’ve decided to keep a regular running blog of Serbia’s post-election transition, at least for as long as there is interest. The more paid subscriptions I get, the more time I can dedicate to doing this, so consider becoming a paid subscriber today.
Informer
One of the first thoughts I had after Vučić’s loss was this: what happens to the vast pro-Vučić media apparatus he built to smear enemies? Very quickly, one group of Serbs gave a possible answer to that question. The night after the election, a group of mostly men broke into the headquarters of Vučić mouthpiece Informer. For those unfamiliar with this noxious rag, Informer was Vučić’s most faithful attack dog. Among its more despicable headlines was “Blockade protesters [students] are threatening to murder and rape children”. It also regularly spread panic and ethnic hatred, sometimes in the same headline, like the time they ran the story “CROATS ARE POISONING THE WATER BELGRADE DRINKS! DANGER: THE SAVA IS FULL OF ANTIBIOTICS.” On Monday night, Informer’s reviled editor-in-chief Dragan J. Vučićević, was dragged out of the building, along with other employees. Some also gathered outside the studios of TV Pink, a pro-Vučić channel, but did not break in. Employees of Informer were roughed up but no one was injured. Still, the images of taunting and humiliation caught the eye of Andreas von Beckerath, the EU ambassador to Serbia and head of the EU Delegation. Posting on X, von Beckerath called on Serbs to refrain from violence.
But rumors quickly spread around town that Vučić’s hooligans were behind the more destructive acts of vigilantism. Indeed, concerns that SNS-linked individuals might use violence to try to discredit SL remain. This morning, the students’ X account tweeted that they “had reason to believe that tonight a certain interest group will attempt to stage incidents in Belgrade…The alleged target of the staged attack will be the Informer newsroom, and they will try to shift the blame onto the students.”
“Revolutionary Terror”
In response to the incidents against Informer and other SNS-aligned media, Vučić and other high-ranking figures from the old regime have made inflammatory statements, prompting some to worry that the struggle is not yet over. Yesterday, Vučić criticized the authorities’ purported lack of response to Informer’s calls for help:
“If the state does not respond, in the coming days we will have to make our own decisions. And don’t you dare mess with that decision. If they make that decision and continue the terror against people who think differently — beatings, assaults, destruction and everything else — while state authorities do nothing, we will be forced to organise ourselves. And let them know that they will bear full responsibility for that.
Then, earlier today, acting president Ana Brnabic posted on X: “They promised revolutionary terror, and we’re seeing revolutionary terror.”
Indeed, the outgoing government is undoubtedly both afraid of retributive violence and secretly welcoming of it. The SNS campaign tried to convince voters that SL would destroy the country if they came to power. But apparently the populace believed that SNS had already destroyed it. Vučić will absolutely seize on any extrajudicial acts of retribution to smear the students as violent and depict himself as the sober voice of reason.