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38 I Southeast Europe bne April 2019
Supporters of Albania’s main opposi- tion party, the Democratic Party, have poured onto the streets of Tirana in a series of mass rallies since February 16, most of which have turned violent. On February 16, the main entrance to the Albanian parliament was demolished, and 10 days later clashes with police broke out as demonstrators tried to stop ministers from the ruling Socialist Party from entering the parliament. Protesters even defied a police decision not to per- mit the rally scheduled for March 5 over fears that MPs’ lives could be put at risk.
The Democratic Party, which has a highly adversarial relationship with the Socialists, accuses Prime Minister Edi Rama of crime and corruption, and says protests will continue until Rama agrees to an interim government pending early elections.
Justice for David
The wave of protest in Bosnia’s Serb entity, Republika Srpska, has very dif- ferent origins. The protests started to gather momentum in December, but the story started last March when 21-year- old David Dragicevic was found dead
in the river Crkvena near the regional capital Banja Luka. His father Davor Dragicevic and his supporters have been gathering ever since, seeking to find out the truth about his death. Over time, the number of people attending the protests has swelled into the thousands, and their demands have expanded to encompass protection for the rights of all citizens.
Police responded by banning their gatherings, and clashes broke out on December 25, which led to arrest war- rants being issued for the organisers. David Dragicevic’s body was exhumed from where it lay in a Banja Luka cemetery and will be reburied in the Austrian town of Wiener Neustadt where his mother lives. His parents say they don’t want their son to lie “in a mafia state”. The Justice for David campaign continues.
The four protest movements in four separate Western Balkan countries have different origins but underlying most protests in the region are corruption,
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growing authoritarianism and lack of opportunity for ordinary people in an area of widespread poverty, alarmingly high unemployment and mass emigra- tion. GDP may be rising more quickly in the region than on most of the European continent, but from such a low starting point, the catchup process is expected
to take decades. And that’s just the economic perspective. On top of that are the politics.
“The protests share one thing in common. They are directed towards the authori- tarian leadership, pro-government state media, corruption, and painful chronic absence of the rule of law,” wrote Vracic.
The long wait for accession
Part of the problem has been the long drawn out transition in countries in
tofore. Reforms in the ‘fundamentals’
of the EU accession process have had a mixed record. Despite the progress reg- istered in terms of laws and regulations adopted, there has been little impact in terms of changing habits and mind-sets in societies but on patronage where who you know is the quickest way to get things done.”
In recent years, however, opposition forces in most countries across the region have struggled to make headway, even given the undoubted problems with the way states in the region are governed. As bne IntelliNews wrote in
a 2018 comment “Divided, weak and doomed to fail”, the fact that most states in the region are dominated by single parties and their leaders may be mostly because of the tools successfully
“Supporters of Albania’s main opposition party, the Democratic Party, have poured onto the streets of Tirana in a series of mass rallies since February 16, most of which have turned violent”
the region and, until recently, the lack of hope that they will make progress towards EU accession – arguably the single greatest incentive for reform
in Central and Southeast Europe – in the foreseeable future. While Brussels has sought to change things with the adoption of the Berlin Process in 2014 followed by a European Commission strategy that sets target accession dates for some of the Western Balkans coun- tries, there is a lot of ground to recover.
“Despite the renewed, albeit limited, focus of the EU on the Western Balkan region, and the odd rays of sunshine piercing the dark clouds here and there, the overall situation has not improved during the past year,” wrote Erwan Fouéré, associate senior research fellow of think tank the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), in a January 2019 policy brief. “Weak parliamentary institutions coupled with the absence
of a culture of political dialogues and compromise have rendered society even more fractured and polarised than here-
employed by the ruling parties, but at the same time numerous small opposi- tion parties seem incapable of setting aside their personal ambitions and working together to beat the status quo.
This resulted in successive protest movements that burned briefly before flickering out. Early 2016, for example, looked much like early 2019, with a series of protests in Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro, followed by the “Don’t Drown Belgrade” protests in Serbia following the furtive overnight demoli- tion of a historic district of the capital to make way for the Belgrade Waterfront development. More protests followed in Serbia in 2017 when Vucic, formerly the country’s prime minister, was elected president.
In most cases such series of protests eventually dwindled, the recent peter- ing out of the mass protests in Hungary that started with the adoption of the so-called “slave law” at the end of 2018 being a case in point.