Huge student-led protests have rocked Serbia, with the potential to unseat the current regime. They serve as an inspiration for all of us: students and workers can learn from each other to challenge our own governments’ corrupt practices.
The protests erupted on 1 November, when the Novi Sad railway station collapsed and 15 people were killed. Students organised 15-minute road blockades in the city, to commemorate the 15 dead. These memorial protests spread to more than 200 towns and cities.
The collapse of the railway station was a symbol of the corruption and cronyism of the government more generally. Serbia has subcontracted Chinese and other foreign firms to complete risky infrastructure projects across the country.
Serbian researcher Iskra Krstic, interviewed in the British paper, Socialist Worker, linked these infrastructure projects to how, “Forests are being decimated. Rivers and the air are filled with poisonous industrial waste. Quarries and mines are popping up at people’s doorsteps. And historic monuments are ‘cleared out’ to leave space for speculative property development.”
Student occupations
When pro-regime thugs attacked protesters at Belgrade University on 22 November, the movement took a more radical approach. Six public universities were occupied by students. Classes in Serbian universities have been put on hold for the past four months.
Students have run the university occupations in a radically democratic way. Decisions, political and logistical, about the direction of the occupation have been made by vote in mass student meetings or by temporary working groups created at these meetings.
But students are also aware of the importance of reaching out to the broader Serbian population. In January, students in Belgrade held a 24-hour occupation of an important intersection and walked hundreds of kilometres to support students blockades in Novi Sad and Kragujevac.
Hundreds of taxi drivers volunteered to drive the students back to Belgrade and 700 were housed by the residents of Kragujevac overnight.
Author Sasa Saranovic wrote for Al Jazeera that, “During the mass rally in Novi Sad, which I attended, students organised the first citizens’ plenum. People were asked to vote by raising their hands if they wanted to extend the blockade for another three hours. Raising my hand among thousands of others was thrilling.”
Workers take action
Organised workers have heeded the call from students to take matters into their own hands.
Teachers’ unions organised strikes since the beginning of the student protests. After union officials signed a deal with the government in February which included a moratorium on strikes until 2028, some teachers, unhappy with the deal, continue to strike as part of a new “Association of schools on strike” despite threats of pay being docked.
The Serbian Bar Association has put the activity of its lawyers on hold and some theatres have closed.
Meanwhile, public transportation and pharmacies unions have protested, while energy workers have organised small protests and workers at the public broadcaster have covered the mass student protests, against the wishes of their bosses.
It is estimated that some 250,000 have joined protests in a country of only 6.5 million people.
Radical democracy from below
No major capitalist power has supported the protesters. Russia and China have backed up Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s claims that the protesters are Western agents.
Despite the Varieties of Democracy Institute labelling Serbia an “electoral autocracy” and Amnesty International describing it as a “digital prison” due to Vucic’s tendency to spy on and arrest political opponents, the supposedly pro-democracy EU has not supported the protesters.
An explanation for the EU’s silence is a strategic partnership between the EU and Serbia to build mines for large lithium deposits in the country. Vucic has appeased all powers by sending weapons to Ukraine while refusing to implement sanctions on Russia. Various European leaders believe he is capable of restraining Serbian ultra-nationalists in neighbouring Balkan states.
The current protests have drawn comparison to the mass movement of 2000 which spelled an end to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s genocidal regime. They also resemble the student protests of 1968, where Yugoslav students protested against the Stalinist Tito regime and fought police on the streets of the capital, Belgrade.
Serbia has seen a range of regimes, from state-run to free market, from Stalinist to liberal to authoritarian. But all have been capitalist, and capitalism never provides workers and ordinary people with a say in how workplaces are run, or political decisions made.
The radical democracy of the student occupations must extend to every sphere of life and become the kernel of genuine socialism from below.
By Finnian Colwell
