The long-anticipated Movement for the People and the State appears to have finally symbolically begun its formal founding, last week, at the house of King Peter I in Belgrade. As announced by President Aleksandar Vučić himself, the initiator of the creation of this new political organization in the form of an “association of citizens,” a 12-member “initiative board” met on Sunday, and will soon prepare founding documents, including a “comprehensive program” of action.
Let us say right away that the aforementioned initiative committee, besides Vučić, contains practically no figures who have been known to the general public so far (and all of them have higher education, two of them from the medical profession are even academicians of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts). Interestingly, this Sunday's move by Vučić has not yet been commented on by any political party in Serbia. Probably because the statement on the initiative to establish the Movement does not indicate whether it will truly have a "non-partisan character", as previously announced.
Namely, Vučić's idea of a "new movement", as he has formulated it several times so far, also included the possibility of "collective membership", which would mean that all the current parties of the ruling coalition would somehow be "drowned" in it, which seems to have been particularly problematic for Dačić's Socialist Party of Serbia. There is every chance that this problem has not been resolved in the meantime and that, perhaps, due to the current political movements in Serbia, it has become even greater.
After launching Vučić's idea to suppress (some kind of) political pluralism in Serbia according to the model successfully installed in the Russian Federation by President Vladimir Putin (who created the complex structure of United Russia), sporadic analyses emerged that the Serbian leader practically wanted to "rebrand" his Serbian Progressive Party, believing that its image had been quite worn out during the years it had spent in power. Therefore, this idea, at least so it seems, was not commented on with particular enthusiasm even within the Serbian Progressive Party itself, with the exception of a few figures from Vučić's immediate circle of closest associates.
The very idea of the first man in power leaving the party that brought him to power and forming a new political organization is not new in Serbia either. Let us recall how Milan Stojadinović, as Prime Minister and then the leading political figure of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, in 1935 initiated the idea of forming the "Heresy" (Yugoslav Radical Community), into which he absorbed a large part of the People's Radical Party, parts of the Yugoslav National Party in Slovenia and the Slovenian People's Party, as well as members of the Yugoslav Muslim Organization.
The attempt to create a non-partisan political organization, some believe, also has its roots in Kardelj's invention of the Socialist Alliance, which did not encroach on the primacy of the Communist Party in power, but was responsible for amortizing all various ideological concepts and directing them towards communist views, as well as for preparing and "implementing" political elections.
Of course, Vučić's idea of a new political gathering of "decent people" who do not want bare power but want to build bridges, roads and stadiums for the future of Serbia and the Serbian people has also been subject to bar assessments and assessments. One of them is that Vučić is forming a "movement of masons and commissioners" - with the allusion that this is a "personal Freemasonry", with which he has allegedly already established connections in the world, or that with this Movement he wants to introduce fresh forces from Bosnia, that is, from Republika Srpska, etc., into local political life.
Finally, it is legitimate to ask whether Aleksandar Vučić was "too late" in establishing the Movement for the People and the State, given the current increasingly frequent "head-on collisions" between the government and the opposition throughout Serbia, or whether he now assessed that this was his last chance to remain in power, while retaining the strategic initiative in the political life of Serbia.
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