Calling for the Check

General exhaustion, or outright burnout, is visible across the board. We see it among students, assemblies, strikers, workers of all kinds and all tax brackets, and among teachers and professors. It’s found among public sector pharmacists facing the threat of privatization and drivers for Belgrade’s public transport company, whose routes are now changed so frequently — due to student or pro-government blockades — that they no longer even know where they’re going.

Citizens’ donations for students and teachers keeping up the blockades are not as generous as they used to be. Many small business owners are seeing a drop in turnover, and freelancers are watching their gigs dry up. And no, this isn’t (only) the result of the blockades: the cost of living has long exceeded average incomes in Serbia, with inflation among the highest in Europe. Many, not just teachers and professors involved in the blockades, haven’t received their salaries. We’ve been pushing forward, or “pumping it up” as a popular slogan has it, for a full six months now. For those who could at least somewhat afford it, this has meant putting life on hold — and now the time has come to settle the bill. At least that’s how the room reads.

When it comes to tallying the numbers, it may seem that the blockades and protests have not yielded any significant political victories. None of the students’ core demands — insisting on accountability for the Novi Sad train station disaster — have been fully met. The prime minister was indeed brought down, only to be swiftly replaced by a new one. Smaller, single-issue citizen protests — against numerous city-killing “urbicide” and “development” initiatives, such as the demolition of the Sava Bridge to benefit of the Belgrade Waterfront project — have similarly borne no fruit. Instead, these projects continue apace in Belgrade and across Serbia. Furthermore, the government is strengthening its grip with many different actions, through legislative pressure on (public) universities and the judicial prosecution of protesters.

Yet, looking at things another way, a whole new world has opened up, and within it, a new kind of politics: horizontal, directly democratic, grounded in blockade and strike tactics, and open to greater unionization and support for labor struggles. Alongside this, a new kind of culture has emerged, marked by (transgenerational) solidarity, empathy, and nonviolence.

“Actually, the most radical part of this isn’t the surface level — the demands themselves fall within a representative and liberal-democratic framework — but the organizing level. The model of plenums [collective assemblies] very easily took root among students, because in moments when we need to organize, it’s almost instinctive — if we’re facing a problem and need to confront it, it’s natural to think of ourselves as equals and to make decisions collectively,” said Ivana Kovačević, a sociology master’s student involved in the blockade. Students realized that this structure protects them from various influences, from their struggle being co-opted, and that it also brings people physically in one place, creating a sense of community.

This new culture has not been confined to university buildings. In a Letter to the People of Serbia, published in March, students issued an appeal for “everybody to assemble.” They called on the general population to organize and form direct-democratically organized people’s assemblies (Zbor) in their locales, as a way of returning sovereignty to the people and taking decisions about Serbia’s future into their own hands. People’s assemblies started flourishing across the country, much as university blockades spread at the end of 2024. Many of these are still in full vigor, with their own objectives, procedures, working groups, and a range of actions, rallies, and public forums held already, as well as established in cooperation with each other.

Another important recent milestone was the May 1 protest, organized jointly by students and five national unions. Students for the first time directly linked labor issues and the Novi Sad rail station disaster, casting this not only in terms of the prevailing “anti-corruption” discourse but — as a representative of the student body at the protest put it — as “consequences of a decades-long collapse of the economy and society, which has mostly harmed working people.” For the trade union scene, co-opted and divided by the government authorities, May 1 was also an historic occasion that produced a draft of Amendments to the Labor Law and the Law on Strikes, prepared by unions and students, as a necessary prerequisite of a new social contract.

Red Scare

The people’s assemblies and cooperation with unions did not sit well with the liberals who populate oppositional media channels and who were eagerly (but unsuccessfully) pushing for their long-held dream of a nonelected, expert government. While the Left in Serbia is decimated, similarly to other countries across the post-communist world, there is a vibrant and committed array of smaller left and anarchist-left organizations, including the Party of Radical Left (PRL).

In a real Red Scare atmosphere, these groups have become a target, depicted in pro-regime tabloids as well as in oppositional liberal media as Khmer Rouge and Bolshevik infiltrators in the student body who are orchestrating blockades from within. Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is, exaggerating the influence and numbers of left groups. Liberal commentators attacked students also, especially those from Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade who had consistently insisted on “systemic change” more than just “governmental change.” In reality, PRL and other groups stuck to what the student plenums had demanded from the outset — namely, no interference from political parties and other organized groups. Such a stance is primarily directed toward the opposition parties, based on previous experience of opposition-run protests that never led to anything but greater apathy and demoralization.

“We publicly supported those statements or actions that were ideologically closer to us, but we didn’t go beyond that — we didn’t cling to the movement. Mainstream liberal parties failed to grow their membership or base, because they don’t know how to operate when there’s a real student or popular movement happening; they don’t know how to function within a movement,” said PRL president Milena Repajić.

While left-wing groups acted respectfully toward the student blockades, leftist ideas also emerged from individuals within the student body. “And these ideas aren’t alien to our population — in the sense that neoliberalism isn’t really seen as common sense, here,” said Kovačević. “When these ideas emerge spontaneously, people accept them as their own. The broader left has often acted in a narrow way, a bit like a small organized sect aggressively pushing its ideas, which created resistance in the past.  The absence of a pamphleteering approach and the policing of others allowed leftist ideas to emerge more clearly, and for students to be able to accept them.”

Exit Strategy

In a political context characterized by government repression, continuous liberal-opposition pressure for a technocratic takeover, and the completely unrealistic expectation placed on the students, by the general adult population that sees them as unworldly angels in mythic fight, the students were left with not much space to maneuver.

Both the assemblies and the students’ collaboration with trade unions represent a revolutionary practice; however, that practice is currently extremely fragile and demands time, various types of resources, and a long-term organizational effort. In a move that resonates with Vincent Bevins’s main finding from his latest book, If We Burn — that politics abhors a vacuum — students have initiated the formation of the social front as a strategy to avoid others filling the open space. Can the movement’s energy really be transferred into an electoral list? Is the electoral horizon itself a step backward from what was gained through the blockades? Will our revolution be stolen?

Social Front or Party

Our country’s history does offer successful examples of a real (anti-fascist) Popular Front, organized and led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which won the 1945 elections and led the country through socialist revolution. Yet today, not only are the conditions greatly different but this type of organizational backbone doesn’t exist anymore.

Moreover, most post-1968 strategies employed by the Left globally have not aged well. Sociologist Cihan Tuğal analyzed three defeated strategies: new social movements, anarchist-autonomist uprisings, and populism. Yet, despite their defeats, some of the spirit of these strategies does need to be incorporated into a new class-based organization. How does this translate into the current Serbian context? As a party cadre, committed to building organizational infrastructure, Repajić still recognizes many gains for the Left in the student-initiated approach.

“In the situation we’re in today, where there’s generally a deep skepticism toward any kind of organizing, where participation in political life is extremely expensive and reserved for an upper-middle-class, bourgeois segment of society — in that context, directly democratic organizing really does have value. This time, a significant number of people have become politically engaged — and that’s irreversible.”

Commenting on the student-initiated Social Front and the issue of organization, Repajić recognizes that the movement was too heterogeneous from the start to expect it to produce a political organization. “But regardless, building a social front is important, because we’re seeing connections between different struggles that didn’t exist before.”

Repajić points to an organization of which she is a member, Joint Action Roof Over Your Head, which fights against forced evictions and for housing policy and against debt slavery. “Now we’ve made contact, we’ve formed assemblies, we’re in touch with other assemblies, with trade unions, with the student movement, and that could lead somewhere. I don’t think there’s any going back from this — from this level of political activation. The ruling party knows that, and so does the opposition, which is why the student movement is under constant attack.”

As students have often said, some of the things they are doing are being done for the first time. Not only do we need to patch together what’s left from publicly owned and publicly governed goods and services, but we need to reinvent many of our organizations, including unions, as well as support the parallel solidarity structures birthed by the blockades. We also need to put extra effort into including those who are left behind: people from certain groups, for instance a friend of mine who works as an unregistered worker in cleaning sector, were left out, if not from the protest, then certainly from the people’s assemblies, simply because they cannot afford the time to participate.

Some of the aforementioned efforts can and should be pursued by nonelectoral means, while some require (public) legislation and funding. In the long run, we need to keep “pumping it up,” but in a more structured and more sustainable way, deepening already established alliances and parallel structures, making them bulletproof against current and future attacks. The focus on elections may come as a disappointment to some, in the context of the crisis of liberal democracy. Yet, perhaps the two are not so counterposed. Serbia’s protest movement can operate on both fronts with their own organizational frameworks, within the electoral-institutional arena and outside of it.