How 2 Mass Shootings Put Serbia’s Populist President Under Pressure

BELGRADE, Serbia—On a rainy Saturday evening in late May, the city center of Serbia’s capital was transformed into a sea of umbrellas. Amid the crowd, two protesters propped up a sign emblazoned with the words “Promoters of Violence,” featuring a large photo of the populist Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic surrounded by images of other top government officials. Amid chants of “Vucic, leave!” and the shrill sound of people blowing whistles, the crowd surged past Serbia’s National Assembly building and through central Belgrade.

The stormy weather didn’t keep tens of thousands of people from turning up for the same reason they have every week since Serbia was rocked by back-to-back mass shootings in early May: to protest against the country’s culture of violence and, by extension, Vucic’s government. 

The “Serbia against violence” protests began as a commemorative act to honor the shooting victims but have morphed into a broader critique of the Serbian government. They have become some of the largest protests since those that helped oust the strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. As a result, they’re putting Vucic, who on Wednesday announced early parliamentary elections for later this year, under unprecedented political pressure at home—and they come just as renewed tensions in Kosovo are putting the Balkan country back in the international spotlight.

Just over a month ago, Serbian society was shocked by the two mass shootings: On May 3, a 13-year-old boy used his father’s gun to shoot and kill 10 people, mostly fellow students, at his Belgrade school. A day later, a 20-year-old man shot people at random in a different part of the country, killing eight and injuring 14 others. Mass shootings are exceedingly rare in Serbia, despite the country being awash in guns left over from the wars of the 1990s, and the school shooting was unprecedented in the region.

Protesters initially showed up to register their shock and grief at the senseless acts of violence, calling for a better approach to violent speech in a country where leading politicians spew vitriol against political opponents and convicted murderers are featured on reality TV shows. 

Vucic, who has served as Serbia’s populist, nationalist president since 2017 (and as its prime minister starting in 2014), responded to the shootings by announcing a one-month amnesty for anyone turning in unregistered weapons; in the first week of the program, government officials said 13,500 weapons had been surrendered. The protesters, however, say it will take more than a government amnesty program to prevent mass shootings in the future: their demands include the resignation of key government officials and the revocation of broadcasting licenses for television channels that show violent content.

Rather than engage with those demands, Vucic responded to the protests by announcing his own pro-government rally in late May and criticizing those involved with the opposition as “hyenas” and “vultures,” intent on using the dead for their own political purposes. Those comments added fuel to the fire for the protesters, helping the weekly demonstrations take on a distinctly anti-Vucic, anti-government direction. 

“The protests were initially not at all against Vucic nor against the government: the motive was different,” Aleksandra Tomanic, the executive director of the European Fund for the Balkans, told FP. “And then they turned into protests against him and against the government when people saw how the government and he personally reacted to them.”

Florian Bieber, the director of the Center for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz, said Vucic’s “ham-fisted and incompetent” response to the protests is part of what has helped them take on the broader air of political opposition. The protests, he added, differ from previous large-scale demonstrations in Serbia in recent years in two important ways: first, they’re larger; and second, they were organized not by the political opposition but from a broader, more grassroots movement.

The opposition parties “are here, they’re present, but they’re not the drivers,” Bieber said. “And so that indicates that there’s a much broader social basis for [the protests] than for previous protests—it really seems to capture a much wider sense of frustration of the citizens with their government.”

The protests also come—perhaps not entirely coincidentally—as tensions flare again in Kosovo. Kosovo, an autonomous province that unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia in 2008 but is not recognized as its own state by the Serbian government, has long been a source of conflict within the region.

The day before the rainy Belgrade demonstration in May, protests and violent clashes broke out after Kosovo’s government in Pristina installed ethnic Albanian mayors in four predominantly Serb municipalities in northern Kosovo. The mayors had been chosen in local elections in April that were boycotted by ethnic Serbs and had a turnout rate of just 3.5 percent. In the days that followed, the clashes between Serb protesters and NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR) peacekeeping mission left dozens of KFOR soldiers and more than 50 protesters injured, prompting the alliance to send additional troops to the region. Vucic, in response, put the Serbian Armed Forces on high alert.

For Vucic, the tensions in Kosovo serve multiple purposes: They fit neatly into his nationalist rhetoric, and they allow him to play the statesman on the European and international levels. What’s more, they have served as a way of diverting attention and momentum from the anti-government protests. Vucic “has been using the Kosovo issue as a perfect way to distract from domestic challenges right now,” Bieber said. “It just remains one of the rabbits he can pull out of a hat when it’s useful for him.”

Thus far, the events in Kosovo don’t seem to have detracted from the momentum of the protests: The most recent Serbia against violence gathering, on the sunny first Saturday of June to mark one month since the first shooting, was the biggest one yet. But with summer approaching and school holidays starting this week, it’s an open question whether the protests will be able to sustain the momentum they’ve built. 

Even if they do continue, experts say Vucic’s support is too entrenched for the protests to translate into short-term political change. Vucic has stepped down as head of his party, the Serbian Progressive Party, but this move was largely expected before the protests; early elections now loom on the horizon, but a real movement to challenge the increasingly authoritarian leader remains difficult.

“There’s still a long way to go to any kind of unified opposition or political path for the opposition,” Tomanic told FP. “The elections here are neither free nor fair, and to change things, it will take more than street protests.”