Debacle after debacle

(danas.rs)

I have always been fascinated by people who understand everything and who, for example, when the story about the situation in Serbia starts, immediately start thinking about geopolitics. Unlike them, I am not an expert in geopolitics, but I am not blind either. I am only interested in the system finally changing in this country and in Serbia getting a chance to become a normal state.

I don't believe in those geopolitical fairy tales that Washington, Brussels, Bonn, London, and all the other centers of power care about Serbia remaining outside the EU and becoming a freer version of North Korea. Serbia is not in the European Union solely because of the current government, not because the EU doesn't want Serbia in its ranks.

What has Serbia done to get closer to the EU? Almost nothing. It never occurs to Belgrade to harmonize its foreign policy with Brussels. That very smart radical star and former editor of Greater Serbia Marina Ragus says that Serbia is not yet obliged to accept the EU's foreign policy, because it is not a member of the EU. It is unlikely that it will work that way. That is why there are clusters that Serbia cannot open, precisely because it has not imposed sanctions on Russia for its aggression against the sovereign state of Ukraine.

Is any country within the EU ready to accept Serbia with such media into its ranks? I'm not sure that even Hungary and Slovakia would raise their hands for such a decision, despite the close relations between the statesmen of those countries and Vučić.

What can we say about elections that are anything but free and democratic. There is no fraud that the President of Serbia is not ready for, when it comes to elections, for the sake of staying in power. We have never heard a comment from Brussels that as a result of those and other elections, we have only one municipality in Serbia where the SNS is not in power, not counting two or three where members of national minorities won local elections.

The President of Serbia has destroyed the political system, and has turned his party into a kind of SSRN - the Socialist Alliance of the Working People. I remember that one of the remarks of the communists in Serbia, who opposed the introduction of a multi-party system, was - What do we need a multi-party system when pluralism is represented in our country through the SSRN.

Despite all these facts, the Serbian president got angry with the EU and for the first time did not send himself, or his replacement, to the EU-Western Balkans summit. In doing so, he took a significant step towards Serbia's accession to the EU.

What can we say about Serbia's relationship with the US? At the beginning of the year, the President of Serbia said that he would meet with President Donald Trump three times in a very short period of time. Not that this did not happen, but he even put Trump in a very awkward situation when he tried to enter a gala dinner at Mar-a-Lago under someone else's name. The problem is that those who called him and convinced him that they could get him into that gathering did not know that it was a donor evening at which, according to American law, the presence of foreign citizens is not allowed, it is forbidden. The President of Serbia "covered up" this debacle with an alleged poor health and urgently returned to Serbia.

The President of Serbia is the only European statesman who did not attend the gala dinner organized by Trump on the occasion of the UN General Assembly session in New York. He was reportedly invited, but he did not want to waste time, he had better things to do, and that work was a meeting with representatives of a country like Curacao.

And then came the sanctions on NIS, and shortly after that the Law on Democracy and Prosperity of the Western Balkans. The topics that the Western Balkans law addresses - from the normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo, irregularities in the 2023 elections noted by international organizations, problems with democracy, support for Balkan countries' membership in the EU - are not topics at the top of the Trump administration's Balkan agenda.

Apart from the classic debacle of Serbia's foreign policy, in all of the above, there is no game of great powers aimed at destroying Serbia and an attempt to enslave Serbia and prevent its economic success. Rather, it will be about the failure to accept reality and the fact that this government is incompetent. Thanks to autocratic methods of governance and media manipulation, the public in Serbia is being presented with a distorted consciousness as the truth, and this leads to a huge delusion in which every problem or awkward situation that Belgrade finds itself in is justified by an attempt by foreign powers to destabilize Serbia. And that is how it will be and will remain. Someone else will always be to blame, and he is honest and infallible.