Serbia’s Protests Test Strongman Leader’s Grip on Power

Serbia’s authoritarian leader should be riding high, lifted by economic growth that is four times the European average, falling unemployment and steadily rising wages.

Instead, President Aleksandar Vucic, battered by three months of nationwide street protests, is struggling to weather his biggest political crisis in more than a decade of strong-arm rule.

Leading the charge against him have been students in wealthy cities like Belgrade, the capital. To try to get them off the streets, the government said in December that it would offer young people state-subsidized loans of up to about $100,000 to buy apartments.

Student representatives had a blunt response: Keep your money.

Also joining the protests have been older, less privileged Serbs, people on whom Mr. Vucic previously counted for support by providing their villages with new roads, sports halls and other facilities.

When students in Belgrade marched for 60 miles last week through villages and small towns on their way to Novi Sad, a thriving northern city on the Danube River, Dusko Grujic, 68, a farmer, cheered them on.

Serbia’s economy, Mr. Grujic said, standing next to his aged tractor piled with bales of hay, is not as robust as official statistics suggest, and food prices are too high. But he added that his main gripes were about corruption, highhanded officials and Mr. Vucic’s tendency to cast all criticism as the work of foreign agents and traitorous political rivals.

The protests began in November after 15 people were killed by the collapse of a concrete canopy at a newly renovated railway station in Novi Sad, a tragedy that students and opposition politicians blamed on shoddy work by contractors tied to corrupt officials.

Supporters of Mr. Vucic responded to demands for the prosecution of those responsible with a crude insult: They put up banners and posters that featured a red hand giving the middle finger on bridges and buildings in several cities.

Milan Culibrk, a prominent economics commentator who writes for Radar, an opposition-aligned weekly, said it was a bad move in a country where people tend to act politically “on their emotions, not their wallet” and only inflamed the situation.

He recalled that Slobodan Milosevic — Serbia’s dictator during the Balkan wars of the 1990s — handily won an election in 1993 despite hyperinflation that had prices more than doubling every two days by tapping a rich vein of nationalism.

A big paradox today, Mr. Culibrk said, is that many of those who have benefited most from Serbia’s strong economy have joined the protests, while those who have not, mainly rural residents and state employees, have tended to stay home.

The economy matters, Mr. Culibrk said, but so long as people are not starving, “other things matter much more.”

One thing that matters deeply to Mr. Grujic, the farmer, is not having to see so much of Mr. Vucic on television. The president appears at the top of nearly every news bulletin, hailing Serbia’s economic gains on state television and on fawningly loyal private channels like Pink and Happy.

“If even my son appeared this much on TV, I’d tell him: ‘Please stop,’” Mr. Grujic complained. “Vucic, Vucic, Vucic — all day, every day.”

Opposition politicians, struggling to compete on the economy, point to inflation, which is falling but still high at over 4 percent. They also dispute the accuracy of statistics that show Serbia’s economy grew nearly 4 percent last year and is on track to expand even more this year, compared with less than 1 percent in the European Union. Serbia applied to join the bloc in 2009 but remains far from being accepted as a member.

Marko Cadez, the president of Serbia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, dismissed opposition quibbling over economic figures as a sign of desperation.

“Look at where the economy is today compared with where it was 10 years ago,” Mr. Cadez said. “They are completely different worlds, night and day.” He pointed to a surging high-tech sector and to more than $5 billion in direct foreign investment last year, more than double the figure when Mr. Vucic came to power.

Unlike in the formerly Soviet republic of Georgia, where weeks of antigovernment protests by demonstrators waving European Union flags have been driven in a large part by hostility to Russia, Serbia’s unrest has little to do with the country’s uncertain geopolitical orientation between East and West.

Maritsa Jovanovic, a former civil engineer who cheered students blocking three key bridges in Novi Sad last weekend, said she had left her job as an engineer in a state agency because of pressure to sign off on documents for projects that violated the law.

“We all just want institutions to work as they are supposed to,” she said. Echoing the feelings of many protesters, Ms. Jovanovic said she thought that the United States and Europe had mostly turned a blind eye to Serbia’s ills under Mr. Vucic in pursuit of their own geopolitical and economic interests.

After the canopy at Novi Sad railway station collapsed in November, Mr. Vucic initially insisted that the structure had not been part of the renovation work.

Then Zoran Djajic, an engineer who had worked on the station, said publicly that a Serbian contractor hired by the Chinese consortium in charge of the renovation had ignored design specifications and dangerously added tons of extra concrete to the canopy.

“Somebody decided to add extra weight on top, and nobody checked whether the canopy could bear it,” Mr. Djajic said in an interview in Belgrade. “This was not an accident.”

When Mr. Djajic went public in November, pro-government media outlets vilified him. But his revelations helped set off what has since become Serbia’s biggest outpouring of public discontent since the protests that toppled Mr. Milosevic in 2000.

Students, followed quickly by many others, began demanding that those responsible for the railway station tragedy be held to account and that all contracts and other documents relating to the renovation be made public. Since then, the government has released thousands of documents, more than a dozen people have been charged over the disaster and the prime minister, a longtime ally of Mr. Vucic, recently resigned.

But the protests show no sign of slowing.

Srdjan Bogosavljevic, a pollster, says it is still too soon to count out Mr. Vucic. “If you ask people if they support students, everyone will say they support them,” he said. “There is no way not to support calls for better institutions and a better life.”

But, he added, this has not translated into a significant fall in Mr. Vucic’s ratings or a surge of support for opposition parties — only intensified hostility between rival political camps.

“Serbia was always polarized, but now this is far more extreme,” he said, adding that people are either very much for Mr. Vucic or very much against him. “You can’t find people who are neutral.”

Dragan Djilas, the leader of the main opposition party, said it would be tough to beat Mr. Vucic’s governing party in an election given that it controls the electoral process and access to state and many private media outlets denied to his foes. “Under these conditions, Vucic will always win,” he said.

Students and their supporters say their goal was never to topple Mr. Vucic.

“Nobody is talking about taking down the president,” said Jelena Schally, who fled Serbia with her family to Iceland during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. “We just want prosecutors and the courts to do their job.”

She returned home several years ago to open a small business offering yoga classes in Brdez, a village near Novi Sad, and was shocked to find that her country, despite having improved drastically economically, still lacked a functioning legal system.

“I know what a normal democratic country looks like from my time in Iceland, and this is not it,” she said after cheering protesters marching past her village.