The silence with which European Union leaders are reacting to student protests in Serbia seems suspicious, and it seems cowardly that the Union, in the case of the efforts of young Serbs, does not defend the values it claims to defend in Ukraine, assesses Tony Barber, editor of the Financial Times' European section, in the author's article "Europe's illiberal tough guy sits on a volcano of public discontent."
"The silence with which EU leaders have responded to the protests seems suspicious. Is it because the Union signed an agreement with (Serbian President Aleksandar) Vučić last year to use Serbian lithium to make batteries for electric cars?" asks Barber in his opinion piece published today in the Financial Times, noting that "many oppose the agreement on environmental grounds."
Barber points out that among those supporting the Serbian students' protest are Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic and American singer Madonna.
This editor points to another contrast - that between political movements in Europe and student protests in Serbia, which he calls one of the largest of its kind in Europe after those that started in France in 1968.
"While the threat of the hard right to liberal democracies is often the focus of attention in Europe, young Serbian protesters are showing that even hard-line regimes - despised as corrupt, incompetent and repressive - are also vulnerable," writes Barber, recalling that similar protests are now heating up in Slovakia, and that illiberal Prime Minister Robert Fico is under attack.
Barber compares the student revolt in Serbia to the anti-corruption riots that swept Bulgaria in 2013.
According to him, protesters in Serbia now face uncomfortable options if they want to maintain the momentum of their pressure on the government: according to polls, they have the support of public opinion, but they want nothing to do with the official political opposition, which they consider tainted by their participation in a rotten political system.
Barber also points to the students' conscious decision not to have a leader, which means that "there is no Serbian Lech Walesa, who led the Polish Solidarity movement in the 1980s, and no Serbian Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident intellectual of that era."
"If they want to see Vučić's back, protesters would have to put aside their fears, cooperate with the opposition, and find a credible replacement for the president," Barber writes.
He points out that Vučić's advantage is that he controls the levers of state power such as the secret police, the judiciary and the media, and that a huge part of society depends on the Serbian Progressive Party, which is "less of a political movement and more of a patronage machine for distributing jobs and privileges."
Barber also highlights the advantages that the students have in their struggle: "One of them is that the vast majority of the protesters are young enough to not know any other Serbian ruler besides Vučić. The thirst for change is fierce. Another is that they gather under the Serbian flag, thereby appealing to the patriotism of the people."
"Students feel none of the shame of older, liberal Serbs who remember that (Slobodan) Milosevic committed crimes under that flag in the Yugoslav wars," adds the editor of the FT's European section.
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