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bne April 2019 Southeast Europe I 39
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What may be different in Serbia and Montenegro in particular this time is that the protests have drawn in a broad range of opponents of the presidents and ruling elites of the two countries.
Leaders stand firm
So far, the countries’ rulers have not been moved to bow to the protesters’ demands, despite the high numbers, and it would be wrong to view the protests as a simple matter of good versus bad, cam- paigners for the rule of law and media freedom against corrupt local elites.
Firstly, these are all democracies, albeit flawed ones, and the leaders in question won their last elections convincingly: Vucic and Djukanovic were elected
to the presidencies of their respective countries in the first round of the last presidential elections. Rama’s Socialists increased their share of the vote in Alba- nia’s latest general election by enough to dispense with their former coalition partner and form a government alone. Both Montenegro and Serbia were classed as Semi-Consolidated Democra- cies by NGO Freedom House in its latest Nations in Transit report, while Alba- nia was a Transitional Government or Hybrid Regime.
Secondly, the participants in the rallies range from liberal intellectuals to far- right opposition politicians. “They have brought together people from different social classes and united leftists and far-right nationalists ... members of the police, military unions, and lawyers from several cities have also supported the protests,” writes Bjeloš of the pro- tests in Serbia.
Some of the most vocal opposition to the Montenegrin government comes from the Democratic Front, several of whose leaders are on trial for their role in the 2016 coup attempt with the suspected involvement of members of the Russian intelligence services.
Meanwhile, in Albania, the Democratic Party was repeatedly criticised for its efforts to stall the Socialists’ reforms
to the judicial system. More recently, officials from the EU and Albania’s other western partners have appealed to the
party to refrain from violence and for its MPs to return to parliament.
One of the calls made by protest leaders has been for governments to resign. Yet each can refer back to their latest poll vic- tory. This perhaps inspired Vucic’s early avowal that he would not cave to protest- ers’ demands, although, as Bjeloš writes, the involvement of police and military unions “presents a more worrying prob- lem for Vucic, potentially leading to a less cautious response than he pursued in
the early weeks of the protests. However, attempts by the opposition to capitalise on the government’s failures have been far from effective,” she adds.
Meanwhile, the Montenegrin govern- ment has been relatively neutral in the face of repeated protests, while Rama invited opposition leader Lulzim Basha to meet him, an olive branch that was turned down. Yet as a response this was tame compared to Rama’s decision to sack half the cabinet in the wake of student protests last year; specific issue protests that involve the population at large have typically had more impact than anti-government actions until the numbers grow really huge.
The exception in the region was Macedonia, where protests repeatedly reached the tens of thousands in spring 2015, in a country of just over 2mn. This eventually led to an intervention by the EU, which brokered the Przino agree- ment between government and opposi- tion, followed by a snap election that eventually – after months of negotiation and the storming of the parliament by supporters of the outgoing government – led to the opposition taking power.
What got Macedonians onto the street in such huge numbers was “the bomb”
a dossier complied from illegally wiretapped conversations among top officials that revealed rampant top-level corruption. So far, the opposition activ- ists behind the protests in fellow West- ern Balkan countries have not had such a powerful tool at their disposal. Yet this year’s protests still have sticking power. It’s a long way off being a “Balkan Spring” but the protests may yet bring about some changes in the region.
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