When Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić announced the reintroduction of Belgrade’s curfew on July 7, it was hard to hide the reaction that immediately welled up in the bottom of the stomach: Does he really take us for such fools?

In March and April, Vučić’s government had introduced rigorous measures to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, including the complete closure of the entire country. But then it decided, practically overnight, to lift almost all restrictions. Suspicions quickly arose that the reason for the sudden easing of measures was the national and municipal elections scheduled for June 21. These well-founded suspicions only deepened when the epidemiologist Predrag Kon — a member of the government’s crisis staff charged with suppressing COVID-19 — addressed the public less than twenty-four hours after polls closed. Even before the ballots had been counted, Kon went public with the information that the situation in Belgrade was “once again threatening.”

The next day, the crisis staff convened an emergency session, which introduced new measures to fight the resurgence of the epidemic. Information soon surfaced that the health care system of the southern town of Novi Pazar was on the verge of collapse and that large numbers of people were dying every day. Journalists from the independent Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) also published a study showing that the number of deaths from coronavirus far exceeded the statistical indicators that had been made public by the government.