Why? right does not support student movement, and the conditions for support are largely met? There, the students took with them pops and fascists and "Kosovo is the heart of Serbia" and nationalist intellectuals and various suklats and kuso and repato, ethno-national symbols and shacks and Chetnik shubars and crusaders and lanterns and icons and glasses, and t-shirts with the image of Dragoljub Mihailovic and Vladimir Putin, in other words everything that is pleasing to the right to hear, see and smell. And yet right-wing parties and movements, sorry, cannot differentiate themselves and declare themselves.
Pro-European parties, it turned out, have a little more difficulty, but the Democratic Party, ZLF and Kreni-promeni provided unconditional support to the students despite the unpleasant list of persons, symbols and props from a while ago, while the hope that the rest will find the strength to gather around a common idea, plan, goal...
The right, however, is not struggling. Why?
Photo: Vreme / Aleksa PetrovskiParticipant of the protest that took place on March 15, 2025
Usurped right space
Even if we leave aside the narcissistic syndrome of small differences, there are two larger problems for the right. The first is that Vučić and the SNS have completely covered the right side of the political spectrum - former radicals, of course, remain radicals, so there is something for everyone: fascism, violence and nationalist blasphemy are flourishing, everything is bursting with patriotism, patriotism and incurable stupidity, Croats, Albanians and Bosniaks are intensely and indescribably hated (Montenegros, let's not be unfair, are getting better ratings), the top of the clergy is at your service.
So milina, except that the right-wing parties, which share the same "values", have nowhere to marry. And no amount of education helps. When a person listens to Prof. Dr. Miloš Jovanović, or prof. Dr. Mila Lompara, fails to extract anything meaningful from their speech. In fact, the right-wingers who have, as it were, turned against Vučić, do not blame him for nurturing the above-mentioned "values", on the contrary, but the ineffectiveness in implementation.
That minister said it nicely: if she had been in Milosevic's place, she would have cleared everything in Kosovo of Albanians. There is, therefore, nothing bad in Milošević's attempt of the same name - the man managed to push hundreds of thousands of Albanians out of their homes, and then from the borders of Kosovo, but NATO put a boot on his neck somehow inconveniently, so he gave up. And that is his sin. Which he failed to do. The "values" he stood for are OK.
Cultivating particularities and republican soil
But there is another problem that is written into the right-wing understanding of the world: particularism.
To put it simply: the right always advocates for special goals and the farthest it reaches is the generality of the people, but it is not able to aim for universality.
This is one of the key differences between the left and the right. The rightist, by definition, is focused on the special. The right-wing international is a kind of oxymoron because it, the right, is interested in what is national, special, separate: the people and the state as an expression of national unity. There is no place for any differences within the gender. In "good order", everyone knows their place: the wife should be quiet and cook, the children should be quiet and listen (and everyone should be happy when they go on "family walks"), the leader should lead the people and take care of all of us, the priests should take care of our souls, especially the misguided ones, and for those who do not understand the essence, collection centers should be organized for educational purposes and so on.
The student movement, on the other hand, despite all its ideological motley, lies on solid republican ground: the fight against corruption, the rule of law, free elections. The substance of the student movement is republican freedom.
Photo: Vreme / Aleksa PetrovskiParticipant of the protest that took place on March 15, 2025 in Slavija
For the right-wing, however, these are secondary values. Their list of values would look like this: people, order, state. And if the people are before the law, if (abstract) order is before freedom, and the state is before the individual, then there is nothing like a republic, and a monarchy (rule by one) would be the "most natural" order. Whether that "one" Caliph, Duce, Führer, Pharaoh, Shah, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Milosevic, Brother Xi, Brother Kim Jong Un or Brother Vučić is less important. To that extent, it is almost impossible for a right-wing party to support a movement that has incorporated republican values into its foundation.
Ideological diversity
There is, of course, not the slightest hope that the right-wingers here could, even for a moment, come out of their ethno-nationalist fortresses and move towards some kind of thoughtful conservatism. The ideological color of the student movement - the color with which students and citizens in their liberating mission walked into Novi Pazar without any problems - is a kind of corrective to hard right-wing positions. From those positions, freedom is seen only as national and state sovereignty, and ideas lead to some right-wing leader becoming a caliph instead of a caliph. So Vučić instead of Vučić.
It has nothing to do with the student movement.
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