Mr. King, you are not in charge!

Sometimes in the country Serbia respected order and it was known who was doing and what was not doing. Here are some examples about it.

A century ago, in January 1912, in the Belgrade court of Terazima a significant event for Serbian parliamentary democracy took place. Academician Ljubomir Stojanović, the leader of the Independent Radical Party (split from Pašić's People's Radicals), which won the recently concluded elections, according to the rules of Western European court protocol, together with several leaders of the party, came to an audience with King Peter I Karađorđević.

In black tailcoats, with top hats in their hands, they all stood in front of the uniformed ruler, introduced themselves and uttered several important and always the same sentences in the process of obtaining a mandate for the formation of a parliamentary government that the crown accepts, guarantees and "nothing more", according to the words and memory of Milan Grol. The king also spoke "a few important and always the same sentences", which ended the official ceremony at the court. It remains to be seen whether the new government will be confirmed by the National Assembly, as the highest authority.

But, right after the end of the entrustment of the mandate, while they were drinking champagne, the king mentioned quite incidentally and more for himself that he would have preferred General Stepa Stepanović to remain the Minister of Defense. The new mandate was torn at that and immediately replied that even the ruler's wish expressed in this way contradicts the principles of the parliamentary monarchy. He threatened to resign, and when they left the confused king in the court, the attendants in the car tried to calm Stojanović and convince him not to resign in front of the assembly. Ljuba Stojanović calmly explained to everyone, even the deputies in the National Assembly, how he sees democracy and the role of the crown in it. The king, at the request of the deputies, was forced to come to the assembly and apologize to Stojanović, but Stojanović's resignation turned out to be irrevocable.

A few years before that, the king also apologized to the deputies in the National Assembly. The occasion was at first glance harmless and was not related to the formation of the government. During an afternoon walk in Topcider, in a place where he liked to stay in the shade of a plane tree, he was horrified when he saw that this very tree had been cut down and he asked aloud who had ordered it, calling that "some" man an inappropriate name! That man, it turned out later, was the minister of agriculture himself, who then sued the king for an insult, and the latter had to come to the National Assembly and apologize to the minister for his imprudence in front of the entire convocation. He promised on his own behalf that never again (and wished on behalf of the whole society, that anyone else in public office) must not act like that in a legal and democratic state, which is ruled by institutions and not by anyone's personal will and hasty reaction.

Half a century before these events, when the father of King Peter I, Prince Aleksandar Karađorđević, defender of the constitution, sat on the throne of Serbia, democracy was not yet very developed, but it was a state of law, so the guarantee of the rule of institutions was provided by the State Council, a body from whose ranks ministers were exclusively elected. In 1856, the prince wanted to appoint the princess' cousin Acika Nenadović, who was not a member of the State Council, to the post of finance minister. The reason was easily explained by the fact that the three main supports of the entire constitutional defense regime, Avram Petronijević, Stojan Simić and Stevan Knićanin, passed away suddenly and in their best years and that now he is looking for support in people he has personal trust in, even if they were his relatives. But it happened that one of the 17 advisers died and the prince, through his loyal advisers, immediately included Nenadovic in the State Council.

Then the minister Ilija Garašanin, who often favored the prince and it was he who kept Nenadović as his assistant minister (of internal affairs), strongly objected and in an official letter to the prince asked him: does he really think that Acika is well versed in the affairs that he (Garašanin) had entrusted to him until then? Although he was appointed as an assistant minister, many contemporaries (among them Jovan Ristić) noticed that even then Acika suddenly began to become "very powerful, having unlimited influence on the prince". He quickly became the regime's most unpopular figure. Even the Austrian consul Teodor Teja Radosavljević, a Serb from Srem, often present at the court and sympathetic to Karađorđević, suggested to the prince that the "increasingly sad circumstances" he is in are precisely "due to the harmful influence of Acika Nenadović". Garašanin's letter left a deep impression on the foreign consuls in Serbia. And just then, according to the instructions of their governments, the French (Desézar) and the English consul (Fonblanc) refused to visit the prince and congratulate him on the Serbian New Year (1857). For the Austrian consul Radosavljević and Baron Prokeš-Osten in Constantinople, this insult of the Serbian prince was a diplomatic scandal.

Somehow immediately after that, the opposition convinced the prince that a monument to Karađorđ should be erected in Belgrade, which both the prince and the Austrian consul T. Radosavljević even enthusiastically accepted, but the Turkish government (the High Porte) in Constantinople resented it. Moreover, in connection with the erection of the monument, in the following days, the Austrian consul engaged much more than the prince. When the Porta learned about this incident in detail, it immediately intervened with the Austrian ambassador in Constantinople, Prokeš-Osten, considering this demonstration (glorification of the former great enemy of the Ottoman Empire) as an open provocation of both Serbia and Austria, and the sultan, in the name of his Empire, gave the final word on this topic with a written ban.

However, the Austrian ambassador, having informed Count Buol, the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Vienna, about everything, became completely enraged, began to scold and criticize his consul in Belgrade: "In my opinion, the instigators of the story about the monument calculated very well and knew what they were doing. The proposal had to compromise the prince, whether he accepted it or not. If he had the courage to tell the opposition that no one had surpassed the glory of his father, he could have told them that on him to decide whether the moment had come to raise the monument; that he would not allow anyone to use intrigue as a tool for things that were sacred to him - he could have kept the helm in his own hands. He, however, had let the story happen and had forgotten that in this way he left a weak impression on the Porte, moreover, that in this case he was the initiator of the whole thing (...) I am surprised that you did not remind the prince that Austria still exists on this to the world...? understandable. He is completely justified, because the prince fell for the story about the monument (...) That hoax, admittedly, cannot disturb a single stone on the map of Europe and when the prince is again on good terms with the Port, that triumph of the prince's opponents and the whole story about it will end".

The oppositionists in the State Council, instead of using the advantage gained at the beginning of 1857, made the biggest mistake themselves: they hatched a conspiracy with the intention of killing the ruling prince ("Tenka's plot", named after Stefan Stefanović Tenka), but the plot was exposed. It turned out that among the hired killers was a man from Sremac from the village of Šimanovci, a newcomer to Serbia, and from the same village was his acquaintance from school, the Austrian consul Radosavljević. This killer, since he did not shoot the prince, somehow found out about Teja, managed to get to him and told him everything. The conspirators were first sentenced to death, then pardoned to life imprisonment.

But, through these events, the reputation of the prince, as well as the State Council, plummeted and it all ended with the convening of the National Assembly (Svetoandreja Assembly) in 1858/59. With her decision, Prince Aleksandar was overthrown, and the Obrenovićs, who returned to Serbia, completely diminished the importance of both the State Council and the current constitution (1838), as the old avengers of both institutions, for which they were in exile for a long time. Thus, in a very unusual way, the constitutional Brazilian regime failed, and the institution of the "former enemy of the Ottoman Empire" had to be respected in international relations as well.

That's how it used to be in the country of Serbia.