Time to stop indulging Serbia’s authoritarian president

After around a decade in power veteran authoritarians invariably face a fork in the road: do they intensify repression, entrench their crony capitalist circle and squeeze what if any remains of an independent media, or do they bow to opposition calls for reform. This has played out many times around the world in the post-cold war decades. Autocrats almost always opt for the first approach and become more hardline. Now, with anti-government protesters on the streets of the capital, Belgrade, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić faces this choice.

For eight years as Serbia’s president, and before that as prime minister, he has ruled with an increasingly interventionist hand, yet runs more of a managed democracy than a full-blown autocracy. Vučić has performed a similarly wily balancing act on the global stage. He has had cordial relations with Moscow without being so pally as to infuriate the EU and the US; he has turned a blind eye to the sale of Serbian arms to Ukraine. He has wooed Beijing for billions of dollars of investment in industry and infrastructure.

Though Serbia is still only a candidate for EU membership, Vučić has close ties with the bloc’s leaders such as France’s President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, not least via holding out the prospect that European mining companies could exploit the country’s untapped lithium deposits to supercharge Europe’s quest for greater energy independence. He also forged good relations with close aides of Donald Trump in the US president’s first term.

Vučić’s hedging routine may deserve to be studied by other multi-aligned states. But back home he is running out of road, as frustrations at his unaccountable and opaque rule have bubbled over into protest. The spark was the collapse of a train station canopy last November in the city of Novi Sad, which killed 16 people. The station had been renovated by Chinese companies under China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Vučić’s opponents blame the collapse on state corruption, shoddy governance and lax oversight, which they see as the hallmarks of his regime. 

Since November, opposition demonstrators have intermittently taken to the streets in large numbers, more recently calling for snap elections. Last week saw the most violent protests yet, with clashes with police in several cities. Over the years Vučić, an extreme nationalist in his youth, has exploited pan-Serb sentiment and irredentism in Serb minorities in neighbouring Bosnia and Kosovo to shore up support. But that card may be losing its potency. 

Vučić could still in theory remove curbs on the non-state media, open up the political terrain for the opposition and launch genuinely independent probes into scandals such as the Novi Sad station collapse. Such moves would also help Serbia’s long-stalled bid for accession to the EU. But reform is not the autocrat’s way: Vučić is behaving to type and cracking down harder.

The EU and Britain have indulged him for too long. Realpolitik has reflected a desire not to see Serbia slip into Russia’s orbit. But this hands-off approach is no longer tenable. Vučić has to be pushed to be more accountable and hold genuinely fair elections; this is anyway essential for any hope of EU membership. The alternative is that Serbia will slide down the path that Georgia has regrettably taken, becoming a phoney democracy over which the EU has no influence and about whose excesses it can do no more than issue statements of protest.

America seems to have left the Balkan pitch for now. But the UK and the EU have not. They should act and use their economic leverage. If they do not and Serbia heads further down the authoritarian path, it will be not just Vučić but also his gaze-averting western backers who are to blame.

Letters in response to this editorial comment:
Serbia shows the dangers of sacrificing democracy for stability / From Savo Manojlovic, Belgrade, Serbia

Irredentism remains the populist weapon of choice / From Carel van den Berg, Laren, The Netherlands

Serbia’s government remains committed to dialogue / From Aleksandar Vučić, President of the Republic of Serbia