When tens of thousands of protesters blocked three key bridges across the Danube River, paralyzing the second largest city of Serbia this weekend, the ruling party in the Balkan State issued a strict warning-not protesters, but to the state-controlled service for reporting them reporting.
After mostly ignored by three months of street demonstrations under the guidance of students across the country, radio television Serbia, long propaganda for President Aleksandar Vucic, suddenly moved the gears and put protests in the new tuma on its news.
Worse, at least for the ruling party, he actually reported that the protesters denied as traitors as traitors in the salary of foreign intelligence services or pupils of the opposition, as it was in the past.
The Serbian Progressive Party of President Vucic complained in an unusual statement late on Saturday about the “scandalous reporting” of the Emitter, saying that he “grossly abused a journalistic profession by olding for politicians who would destroy the Constitutional Order of the Republic of Serbia.”
The media control was the central pillar of Serbia’s system under Mr. Vucic, allowing him to break through more circles by protest by demonizing and discrediting protesters, and to attract himself firmly to power for more than 12 years.
Many, however, are now asking his control over the media, and the team may be the president’s increasingly authoritative rule.
“This is a small but maybe a revolutionary change,” said Jasmina Paunovic, State Prosecutor of Veterans in Belgrade, the capital. She added that the longtime Kraljevica broke through the whole system as “dirty” to lose their state affairs or confronted with disciplinary action.
She said that many judges and prosecutors she knows, although everyone ultimately depends on the state for their career, now support students, at least privately. Serbia’s lawyer’s chamber voted on Sunday for lawyers to suspend their jobs for a month in solidarity with students who barricaded campuses across the country.
The protests of the weekend in Nova USA, held three months after a structural failure on the newly renovated railway station in the city, were killed by 15 people, not only students from local universities and Belgrade, but also a bunch of elderly people angry about what they see as a system full of system corruption.
The demolition of a concrete canopy of November 1 was suspended over the entrance to the station knocked down the people below it and launched a protest movement of snowballs, which was guided by the belief that the official carelessness and graft were responsible for the tragedy. The station was renovated by a consortium of state -owned Chinese companies, and working on the canopy was performed by a private Serbian contractor promoted by officials.
Recent protests during several weekends are the greatest outburst of dissatisfaction with the demonstrations of streets in the late 1990s against Slobodan Milosevic, a nationalist leader of the Serbian during the Balkan Wars that followed the collapse of the Communist Yugoslavia.
Svetlana Bistrovic, 43, nurse and mother of two, said she decided to cheer students on Saturday who blocked the main railway and road bridge in Nova US on Saturday after seeing that Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic appeared on Basketball game on Friday night wearing a T -shirt with the words “Students are champions.”
She waved a sign decorated with slogans of protest with a plastic tennis racket.
That Mr. Djokovic, whose family had been opened in the past in the support of President Vucic, was in line with protesters, she said that “in this country it is” a change in this country. “
But Mr. Vucic does not show signs of giving up. Last week he Lined his premiereMilos Vucevic, a loyal ally, former mayor of Novi sad and chairman of the Administrative Party, known as SNS, leaving the land without a government.
But Mr. Vucic, convinced that his party may overcome the turbulent opposition parties in any new elections, given the uneven election playground, has since vowed to go to the offensive against his political opponents and call the general elections if Parliament does not approve and the new government If you wish.
“I will not give anyone this country on a tray,” he told the fans on Saturday. “I’ll fight, fight, fight.”
Nebojsa Vladisavljevic, a political science professor at the University of Belgrade, described Serbia as a “spin dictatorship”, which, like other post -communist governments in neighboring Hungary and elsewhere, is “less repressive but much manipulative.”
He said that there was a sudden shift in the sending of the message of the state Emiter, “RTS” only part of the game showing that there is a little honest media coverage. “
And even without state television and radio firmly on the president’s side, Mr. Vucic continues to control the battery of powerful media weapons, such as the private television station of Pink, which remains unwaveringly loyal. And a series of vitriolian tabloids do not show signs of Željenje in the support of the president.
Tabloids such as Informer, a particularly vicious attack for the Government, were rampanting student activists as traitors who served neighboring Croatia, the main enemy of Serbia during the 1990s wars through the ruins of Yugoslavia.
Mila Pajic, a university student in the new Awus actively organizing a protest, said the media was aligned with the government as “mentally unstable.” She was demonized as an anti-serbian, and Informer posted a video of arguing with his boyfriend and claiming that the couple struggled to have secret financial resources from abroad. That accused her of “in a crowd with Croatia.”
The tabloid story, she said, “is completely fabricated” and turned “a regular argument between two people in the 20s into a national scandal.”
She said that the transition of the state emiterion to a more sympathetic coverage of the protest “is not a huge step forward, but a small step in the right direction.”
Mr. Vladisavljevic, a political scientist of Belgrade, interpreted the rejection of the Administrative Party journalist for their neutral coverage of events in a new sadness as a “preventive move to hold them in line” and the message of the party in a strong rural base that “nothing has really changed.”
“They worry that the media could turn. They take care of the military, prosecutors, everyone,” he said. “But we’re not at a turning point yet.”
