BELGRADE — The protests that shut down Serbia’s capital were fiery but mostly peaceful, in no small part due to a police force that understood the entire government’s fate rested on its restraint.
“In the end, they destroyed 186 tractors, and the only big fight — they made it between themselves,” Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said the Monday after the March 15 demonstration. “No one responded to them. We didn’t want to arrest anyone. At the end, we had to arrest 44 guys. Then it was 13 detained because they were either drunk or causing some violence.”
Just two days after anywhere between 107,000 and 325,000 Serbs stood screaming for Vucic’s political ouster outside Novi Dvor, the presidential palace, the streets were dead, with not a protester in sight. Vucic, who has enjoyed widespread approval for the past decade he has governed the country, has now spent the last four months politically battered by protest after protest by rogue students and professors keeping universities shuttered.
March 15 was supposed to be “D-Day,” or the day that would bring the populist president’s reign to an end. But D-Day has come and gone, the streets cleared out, and Vucic still stands in the royal palace that once housed the since-deposed Karadordevic dynasty. After months of trying to buckle to the protesters’ demands, Vucic is declaring victory and moving on, and the return to power of President Donald Trump is key to whether or not he can pull it off.
As recently as last summer, Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party, or SNS, dominated local elections even in Serbia’s most liberal cities. Vucic won his 2022 presidential election with nearly 60% of the total vote. Serbia’s economy grew by nearly 4% throughout 2024 while seeing an 8% increase in foreign direct investment. The economic engine of the Balkans was poised to be the rare bright spot on a continent dominated by a flatlining Germany, with Serbia’s remarkable and persistent growth under the decade of Vucic’s neoliberalism a satisfying up-yours to the Westerners who have blocked Serbia’s admission into everything from the European Union to the World Trade Organization. Meanwhile, Trump, who oversaw the landmark economic normalization deal between Serbia and Kosovo during his first term, was poised to return to power after four years of Joe Biden mostly asleep at the wheel of Balkan policy. As a bonus, the Vucic administration had just inked a deal to allow Jared Kushner to reconstruct the former Yugoslav army headquarters, which the Trump family had been pursuing since 2013.
Then, it all quite literally came crashing down.
On Nov. 1 last year, the canopy of the newly renovated Novi Sad train station collapsed, killing 15, severely injuring two, and triggering an immediate slew of outrage that manifested itself in protests across the country. Ostensibly led by a mostly faceless morass of university students and professors claiming opposition to “corruption,” the protests occurred across 400 cities with a list of four demands from the government: a 20% increase in higher education funding, a reprieve from criminal charges against protesters, an imposition of criminal charges on agitators who had attacked the protesters, and the categorical release of all documents related to the renovation of the railway station.
The Serbian government has fulfilled at least two of the demands. In February, the government passed a 20% increase in higher education spending to reduce tuition by 50%, and true to his promise in December that he would show clemency to protesters arrested during demonstrations and crack down on those who inflicted violence on the protesters, Vucic pardoned 13 students and professors detained in January while dozens of agitators are being prosecuted for attacks on protesters — something he tells me he now regrets. Prosecutors, who operate independently of the Vucic administration, have also expedited indictments of more than a dozen people involved in the reconstruction, including Vucic’s former construction minister. Labor Minister Nemanja Starovic also tells me that the government has released “terabytes” of “tens of thousands of pages” of documents. So, why aren’t the students happy yet?
“If anyone tries to assess them from a very objective point of view, everyone can establish that we have already, as a government, fulfilled each and every one of the demands,” Starovic said. “The problem is that there is nobody on the student side of the debate who is willing to acknowledge that, to give us proper metrics or indicators for the fulfillment, so these demands now seem like some kind of a moving target.”
And indeed, the protesters did not seem to express any unified, coherent, or tangible policy demand. While the protesters deployed some nationalist imagery, wielding Serbian flags and photos of Jesus while following a mascot of the World War II royalist Gen. Draza Mihailovic, the overall vibe of the Belgrade bonanza was closer to Woodstock than the March on Washington. Despite the government limiting train travel to the city and shutting down major thoroughfares into the capital, the thousands who had congregated on foot shotgunned beers, posed for selfies, and blew on insufferably shrill whistles as they chanted calls to continue to “pump it,” or keep increasing the pressure on Vucic.
While Vucic was personally vilified by demonstrators, outside of some broadly antisemitic imagery against the pro-Israel SNS, Belgrade lacked any of the causes célèbres usually at the center of youthful protests around the West. None of the protesters mentioned feminism or LGBT rights, and the one rare protester who carried a Ukrainian flag had it seized from him by the rest, reflecting the population’s historic coziness with Russia. (In spite of this legacy of friendship and public neutrality, Vucic’s government has quietly sent Ukraine nearly a billion euros of military aid since Russia’s invasion.)
But the biggest sign that Belgrade was much ado about nothing is that nobody, not one protester, even mentioned the likeliest cause behind the collapse: not the corruption of Vucic’s government but the Chinese Communist Party.
The current Novi Sad railway station was originally constructed in 1964, the pinnacle of Josip Broz Tito’s communist rule over what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Engineering experts estimated that the station only had 50 years before it would need major renovations, and by 2021, it was pushing its luck. Although the state-owned enterprise Serbian Railways Infrastructure operates the station, the renovations that began in 2021 were conducted by a subsidiary of China Railway Group Limited and China Communications Construction Company. Because Serbian law only allows prosecutors to identify publicly criminal suspects and those charged with their initials, we don’t know if any of those facing trial belonged to the Belt and Road Initiative, but prosecutors said the defendants stand accused of “serious offenses against general safety” and “irregular and improper construction works.”
The protesters have no interest in this line of questioning. In fact, they have zero curiosity or condemnation about policy in general.
“What were the main messages from the speakers last night?” Starovic asked. “‘We want better society, we want peace in the world.’ Of course! Yes! But they seem to be kind of hostages of their catchall approach. Don’t be willing to alienate any group, because we’ve seen from the very far Left anarchist groups to the very far Right, and all the young people, students in between, and then with the will to preserve that catchall approach, they were not able to specify their political message and political demand.”
Just one day before the March 15 protest, Donald Trump Jr. released his podcast episode with Vucic. The U.S. president’s son spoke with Vucic about the history of NATO’s bombing of Belgrade and the precedent it set for Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine more fluently than one could ever expect, say, Hunter Biden to, but they spoke very little about the protests and the Chinese role in the canopy collapse. In all fairness, so have the students.
I understand well enough that the student protesters haven’t actually targeted the crux of the problem, so I ask about the Chinese partners in the Novi Sad reconstruction. It’s a losing war to wonder — because the protesters haven’t even asked Vucic about the actual reason for the collapse.
“I know that you would like to hear from me something bad about the Chinese,” Vucic said with a sigh. “I cannot say that they were doing many things. They do it quite well in a proper way, and if I would say Americans were building the widest and the best highway in this country, and we were very much criticized by all those protesters because of that highway, saying, ‘Well, you paid a lot to an American company; you paid twice more than you needed.’ They built that. They built that in a terrific way, and we are happy to have it, and they use all these highways.”
Vucic is hell-bent on making Serbia the fastest-growing economy in Europe, specifically because of the potential of Trump.
“I can tell you just one short story,” Vucic said. “When we were trying to negotiate the Washington agreement [between Serbia and Kosovo], I saw that [Trump’s] people were very hardworking people at that time.”
Robert O’Brien, Richard Grenell, and Jared Kushner sat with Vucic in the White House for three hours.
“We’re coming from a very small country, for big American leaders, and these guys were three out of 10 of the most important people in the United States,” Vucic said.
After four months of attempting to appease his protesters, Vucic seems done.
“I want to focus on the economy, on our future, resolving all the issues in the parliament in a very democratic way, because I believe that we showed how restrained and refrained we were from using any kind of force and very happy, because you don’t see this kind of images in Europe, when the others are organizing riots,” Vucic said. “My dear friends in the United States of America, you’re gonna understand everything. See CNN, what CNN is saying, the truth is on the opposite side. And that’s it. You’re gonna see that they do and they say everything against me, exactly what they were saying about President Trump. And then you’re gonna understand absolutely everything.”
The Serbian parliament accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Milos Vucevic on March 19, setting up a scramble to form a new government. Some have even floated the possibility of snap elections.
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The White House did not respond to comment, but Don Jr. already has another trip planned to visit Vucic in the coming month. Grenell, Trump’s former envoy to Serbia and Kosovo and now the presidential envoy for special missions, has stood by Vucic and cautioned not his administration but the protesters.
Vucic is a pragmatist who has survived what the protesters called D-Day. Plenty of previous princes and dictators have been forcibly ousted from the palace, and no armed guard or wall of tractors could save them. Vucic, for the first time in the nation’s democratic history, has a friend in the White House.
Tiana Lowe Doescher is an economics columnist for the Washington Examiner magazine.
