Page 36 - BNE_magazine_04_2019

36 I Southeast Europe bne April 2019
Serbian protest movement "1 in 5 million" have been happened every weekend for months
BALKAN BLOG: Protests with staying power Clare Nuttall in Bucharest
It has been another weekend of political drama in three Western Balkan states. Albanian opposition supporters tried to storm the parliament in Tirana but were forced back by riot police. Demonstrators in Serbia forced their way into the state television sta- tion in protest against media bias. And there were more mass anti-government protests in tiny Montenegro.
The Western Balkans have a habit
of periodically breaking out into thousands-strong protests that erupt
in several countries simultaneously before eventually petering out in the face of entrenched local elites. This time around, months of protests in Serbia – that have more recently been mirrored in Albania and Montenegro – show no signs of abating, but the political leaders of the three countries, all elected by landslide votes, have no reason to cave.
It was this intransigence on the part of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, evi- dent in his swift and decisive response to the initial protests in Belgrade, that gave rise to the name of the movement,
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“1 in 5 million”, when the president announced that he wouldn’t agree to protesters’ demands even if there were five million people in the street.
That would be unfeasible in Serbia, whose population numbers just over 7mn, but the protests, which have taken place every Saturday evening since December 8 regularly draw tens of thou- sands of people and have spread from Belgrade to other Serbian cities as well as Serb dominated northern Kosovo.
In an echo of Ukraine’s Maidan protests in 2014, the protests were were initially sparked by a single issue, an attack on
Opposition figures claimed Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) was behind the attack, though this has been denied by the ruling party. But from their initial focus on Stefanovic, the protests have expanded in scope to a backlash against what participants say is Vucic’s autocratic regime and the destruction of media freedom in the country. They want Vucic and the government led by the SNS to resign.
“[T]he protests reflect dissatisfaction with the current regime that goes far beyond the single issue of political vio- lence. The roots for this dissatisfaction lie in broader concerns over Vucic and
“What started as a protest against state violence and unprecedented state media control revealed all the cracks of a deeply broke system”
opposition figure Borko Stefanovic in the town of Krusevac, but they have since become a lightning rod for the more gen- eral dissatisfaction with the ruling party.
his party eroding political rights and civil liberties, putting pressure on indepen- dent media outlets, the judiciary and the opposition, while also suffocating civil