At home, his success has been built on uniting the business class behind him and rigging the electoral process. Mr. Vucic has also built a network of so-called loyalists who, he recently claimed, “swore in blood” to serve him. These are the people he trusts more than any single institution, even those entirely under his sway. Though the government uses its control of the media to secure the support of a significant portion of the population, it still depends on this layer of loyalists as both its foundation and its primary instrument of intimidation.
This is the climate Mr. Vucic is relying on as he moves against the rectors, professors, students, independent journalists and intellectuals who have joined the protest movement. As university occupations and student-organized assemblies have continued, he has frontally attacked Serbia’s educators and academic community. Including threats of firings, the withholding of salaries and the beating of students, it amounts to a wholesale assault on universities.
In this, he is following in the footsteps of fellow would-be autocrats. In Viktor Orban’s Hungary, one of the most important higher education institutions in Europe, Central European University, was effectively forced out of the country. In Turkey, after a failed 2016 coup attempt, thousands of professors were fired and a few even imprisoned under accusations of supporting Fethullah Gulen. And in the United States, of course, President Trump has turbocharged a conservative attack on universities, threatening cuts and withholding funding from major institutions.
In Serbia, no one has backed down. In collaboration with workers and trade unions, students organized a major May Day protest and have been trying to raise international awareness of the struggle. A group of 80 students cycled to Strasbourg, France, to bring the situation to the doors of the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, and a group of runners are making the marathon journey from Belgrade to the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels to do the same. Determined to change the country for the better, protesters are now calling for early elections.
There’s no assurance they’ll succeed. After months of protests, blockades and door-to-door campaigning, many are exhausted. Some have been imprisoned, accused of plotting a coup, and there have been incidents of police brutality. But for all the difficulties, the protesters are doing it their own way — without leaders, without hierarchies, through plenums and strictly horizontal decision-making. Equal and united in solidarity, they are changing Serbia and setting an example for the world to follow.
Now, that really would be a miracle.
