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The protest on July 9, however, was radially different from the first two
as it was peaceful throughout with
no conflict between demonstrators
and police. But violence returned the following night, when protesters again tried to storm the parliament. According to the public broadcaster RTS, 19 people were injured and taken to ER that night while 70 protesters were arrested.
Protesters fear lockdown hardship
The protests started as a spontaneous reaction of citizens mad at Vucic’s decision to impose a curfew again as well as mandatory vaccination for flu in the autumn. On July 10, the country had the largest number of registered deaths from COVID-19 in a single day – 18 people lost that battle, covid19.rs data indicates.
Serbia had a strict lockdown this
spring, but Vucic canceled the state
of emergency and lifted all measures
on May 6, likely aiming to secure a larger number of voters in the June 21 parliamentary and local elections as well as to get the economy moving again. This led to a massive re-opening of bars, restaurants, clubs, public gatherings, proms, weddings, football matches
and tennis tournaments, without any preventive measures. Simply said,
life went back to normal. For their
part, citizens didn’t take any personal responsibility and behaved as if the virus wasn’t present anymore, claiming that everything was permitted.
However, infections continued to spread, hospitals started getting packed and the health system faced worse difficulties than during the first couple of months
of the pandemic. The very day after
the elections, the government started announcing new measures as spikes occurred in a few towns. According to the latest information from the official COVID-19 website for Serbia, 386 of
the 8,646 tested in the last 24 hours
had the virus. Since the beginning of
the pandemic, 370 people have died of coronavirus which is a 2.09% death rate.
The number of positive tests is some way below the real number of infected people as many stopped going to
get tested since COVID hospitals are overcrowded and the most dangerous place to be right now. The tests have
a high percentage of false negative results so people with identical symptoms often have different test results. Not everybody with symptoms is being tested either and many (mainly teenagers and young adults) don’t feel any symptoms and but still carry the infection.
As the economy opened up from May, more people got infected at work. Several spikes occurred in factories throughout the country. In many towns like Vranje and Novi Pazar, in the south and west, respectively, whole families got infected. Often young people caught the virus first, but being almost asymptomatic unknowingly spread it to friends and relatives.
A couple of infected people who didn’t want to be named in this story said that the COVID hospital was the scariest thing they had ever seen. “This thing
is serious! People are dying! This will destroy us! If it doesn’t kill us, it will kill our economy because if the government doesn’t stop everything now, for at
least two weeks, this will not stop. We have mainly public healthcare, money for hospitals comes from the budget. There is no budget in the world that can manage this... On the other hand, if the economy stops, people will lose their jobs, their incomes, they will start dying of hunger in addition to corona. These are very tough times and no one knows how [the crisis] will be overcome. We need to unite and protect each other as much as possible. That’s the only way to get time for protests, healthy and safe protests,” one told bne IntelliNews.
People who were already angry with the government because it kept them locked up for two months and then just opened everything back up as if nothing had happened got madder because they saw the attempt to impose a new curfew as hypocrisy and fake care, and thus found it reasonable to protest and risk getting infected. Behind this madness was the fear that a new lockdown would lead
to job losses and poverty. Many see it as a better outcome to get infected and
recover than to lose their job and never find a new one.
The government launched stimulus measures in the spring – including direct assistance to all adult Serbian citizens
of the dinar equivalent of €100 – but these will not last indefinitely. The moratorium for bank loans declared by the government in late March already expired at the beginning of July.
The unemployment rate remained
flat month-on-month at 9.7% in Q1, according to the National Bank of Serbia (NBS), but this is likely result of jobs being temporarily ‘frozen’ during March, the first month of the corona lockdown. Worse figures are expected for Q2.
Polarised
Eight years after his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) won its first election in 2012, Vucic remains popular among large swathes of the Serbian electorate. The SNS’s recent victory in the June
21 general election owes much to perceptions of Vucic and his leadership during the pandemic. Serbians have become increasingly polarised under the SNS’s rule and the president’s opponents are angry and frustrated. Others see
no realistic alternative to Vucic and the SNS; the latest wave of protests have no apparent leaders.
Some citizens who are worried that protests could go far enough to force Vucic to resign even though he said it wasn’t going to happen, saying: “I’m elected by the people! I am not scared of anyone!”, in his statement to the nation on July 8.
“Vucic is not the nicest person in this country but he is way nicer than those... I don’t even know how to call them. Who will take over the government if they kick out Vucic? [Former Dveri member Srdjan] Nogo and [Dveri leader Bosko] Obradovic? It won’t be good for any freedom lover in Serbia. Because, you know, Russia and China are not the same as the EU. I do not want to live
in country that follows the standards
of Russia and China and has a wall between it and the EU. They [Nogo and Obradovic] didn’t participate in the
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