In Serbia, there’s a phrase for a type of stubbornness that sees somebody act out of spite or defiance slightly than yield to the need of others: “inat.”
It’s one thing Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić is appearing exceptional ranges of at this time.
For just about a 12 months, anti-government protests have roiled the Balkan country. They intensified over summer time 2025, culminating in offended clashes between scholars and police in August and September.
However Vučić has stood company within the face of rising requires his resignation. In reality, as students of politics and historical past in Southeast Europe, we have now watched Vučić take Serbia even additional down an authoritarian trail. In so doing, he’s drawing from the well-worn playbook of autocratic leaders previous and provide – no longer least his former boss Slobodan Milošević and Vladimir Putin, the Russian chief Vučić overtly admires.
But, whilst Vučić can draw on toughen from Putin and fellow authoritarians out of the country, he’s shedding legitimacy at house. Opposing him is a brand new era of civic activists who’ve received the Serbian public’s backing through reclaiming “inat” as drive for sure exchange.
Unmoved through a motion
The fast cause for the continuing unrest got here in November 2024 with the fatal cave in of a teach station cover in Novi Unhappy, a town in northern Serbia.
Renovated with investment from China’s Belt and Highway Initiative, the cover used to be one of the initiatives touted through Vučić’s authorities as proof of its good fortune in attracting overseas funding. The coincidence’s 16 deaths, then again, served to sharpen questions on corruption, screw ups of oversight and authorities duty.
Pupil protests accumulated momentum via iciness and into spring. One demonstration, on March 15, noticed greater than 300,000 folks end up in Belgrade. Activists have additionally hired civil disobedience ways, like staging pop-up roadblocks in Serbian towns, to deal with power at the authorities.
However Vučić has remained stubborn. On Sept. 1, whilst huge crowds accumulated in Belgrade and different Serbian towns, Vučić joined Putin and different leaders crucial of Western-style democracy at a big army parade in Beijing.
Then on Sept. 20, Vučić staged his personal display of energy, with squaddies and tanks collaborating in an army parade in Belgrade as Russian-bought MiG-29 fighter planes flew overhead.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić hang a bilateral assembly on Sept. 2, 2025, in Beijing.
Getty Pictures
From reform to repression
Vučić’s response to the protests and his cozying as much as leaders of Russia and China disclose how the Serbian chief’s politics have modified.
He used to be as soon as perceived as a pro-Ecu reformer. Certainly, Vučić and his Serbian Modern Birthday party campaigned on a pro-Ecu Union platform within the 2012 election that introduced them to energy.
First serving as deputy high minister sooner than turning into high minister in 2014, Vučić received plaudits for searching for to unravel long-standing tensions over Kosovo’s standing as a sovereign nation. At the moment, it used to be Vučić who led his nation’s negotiations with the EU over a normalization of family members between Serbia and its former province.
Vučić additionally confirmed willingness to toughen Serbia’s ties with neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina. While many Serbian electorate nonetheless felt number one affinity for the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska, whose military dedicated genocide at Srebrenica in 1995, Vučić risked home censure when, in 2015, he categorized that bloodbath of Bosniak males and boys through Serbian paramilitaries a “monstrous crime.” Vučić additionally confirmed up at Srebrenica to pay his respects to the sufferers, in spite of native hostility.
The ones diplomatic gestures, along side his good fortune in attracting overseas funding, received Vučić world reward as an efficient reformer. Serbian electorate, likewise, stated the industrial balance and the rustic’s progressed popularity.
Backtracking on document
The ones checks began to modify in earnest, then again, after Vučić secured election as president in 2017. Critics say that he has leveraged his place to accumulate energy and affect, mimicking strategies acquainted to these residing beneath authoritarian-leaning governments in Hungary and Russia.
In the meantime, the U.Ok.’s Brexit vote in 2016, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 after which the worldwide disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic all modified the dynamics of the world group, decreasing outdoor power that had complicated democratic norms.
What adopted in Serbia used to be backsliding on democracy. Serbia’s once-vibrant media now operates as authorities cheerleader. Unbiased journalism shops have confronted harassment, censorship and complaints as a part of a state-sponsored marketing campaign of censorship.
In the meantime, at the diplomatic entrance, Vučić modified his track on Kosovo. He now pledges to offer protection to the pursuits of the breakaway province’s Serbs and portrays Kosovo’s Albanian chief, Albin Kurti, because the impediment to any normalization deal.
On Bosnia-Herzegovina, Vučić has additionally backtracked, expressing toughen for long-time Bosnian Serb chief Milorad Dodik – who has been barred from place of job through the rustic’s constitutional courtroom, however defies that ruling.
To Serbian audiences, Vučiċ accuses the EU of duplicity and anti-Serbian prejudice. In the meantime, he smears the student-led motion as a Western-led “color revolution” geared toward politically motivated regime exchange. Critics are “fascists” and “foreign mercenaries.”
Europe will get sensible to Vučiċ
In all this, Vučiċ has drawn on Kremlin speaking issues and an authoritarian playbook to distract consideration clear of his authorities’s practices. He and his allies forged the present protests no longer as a motion constructed on grassroots mobilization, however as the results of meddling through overseas brokers.
In taking this authoritarian flip, Vučić invitations critics to look parallels with Milošević, beneath whom the present president served within the Nineteen Nineties as minister of knowledge. Milošević, who died whilst on trial for battle crimes, did a lot to inflame Serbian nationalism within the early Nineteen Nineties and presided over the bloody wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. After Milošević’s ouster within the Bulldozer Revolution of 2000, Vučić spent a decade in opposition sooner than returning to authorities in 2012.
And whilst Ecu diplomats have been for a few years desperate to courtroom Vučić, even tolerating hedging ways that noticed Serbia amplify ties with Russia and China, that modified amid the president’s reaction to months of protest.
In March, Ecu Fee President Ursula von der Leyen famous at the social platform X that Serbia “needs to deliver on EU reforms, in particular to take decisive steps towards media freedom, the fight against corruption and the electoral reform.”
Marta Kos, Ecu Commissioner for Expansion, delivered blunter overview six months later, noting in a Ecu Parliament debate the “wave of violence and continuous use of force against protesters in Serbia.”
Slobodan Milosevic’s legacy hasn’t been fully erased.
Chip Hires/Gamma-Rapho by way of Getty Pictures
Such grievance has observed Vučić flip more and more to China, Russia and likewise to the Trump management, with Donald Trump Jr.’s talk over with to Serbia in March as emblematic of the warming ties between Washington and Belgrade.
The ‘inat’ of the Serbian folks
Vučić has spent over a decade directing a political spectacle through which he gifts himself as the only drive able to saving Serbia. And for the easier a part of the previous 12 months, he has tried to paper over the cracks in his rule via a technique of implementing more and more authoritarian measures at house whilst searching for toughen from like-minded regimes in another country.
However the truth that this ploy has no longer extinguished the nonetheless ongoing anti-government protests suggests it can be a failing tactic.
And prefer Milošević within the past due Nineteen Nineties, Vučić turns out to have underestimated the drive of “inat” of the Serbian folks. The Bulldozer Revolution that ousted Milošević used to be constructed from Serbs from quite a lot of backgrounds, all made up our minds to convey down an unpopular autocrat who put his personal political survival above the desires of electorate.
They did so via grassroots mobilization and shared reputation that the actual impediment to prosperity used to be no longer overseas conspiracy, however Milošević himself. For all his person stubbornness and spite, Milošević may no longer fit the resilience and resolution of Serbia’s electorate.
That very same power seems to be within the streets of Belgrade now, sustained through a brand new era of electorate status company in opposition to the strategy of a distinct autocratic chief.
