Just as the devil's greatest success is in convincing people that he does not exist, so the greatest success of the creators and implementers of toxic (authoritarian, anti-democratic, isolationist, neoconservative, clerical, etc.) ideologies and policies is in convincing people that they - do not have ideology or politics. Or that they have more of them, but that they don't really believe in any of them, they just use them depending on the need of the moment. Sometimes alternately, sometimes consecutively. Some people call it a "catch all" policy, but I'd rather call it a supermarket policy: we have carnivore shelves and vegan shelves, and we love them all equally as long as their different, and so on opposed they pay for the necessities at the same cash register. Ours.
The so-called The Serbian Progressive Party balanced on that ideological scale for quite a long time and relatively successfully, and the goal of balancing was to become almost impossible to define, in the worldview sense "incorporeal", which made the fight against it a kind of shooting at the spirit with a slipper. And you can't hit a ghost with a slipper, even when the ghost is actually an idiot under a sheet with slits for eyes.
It wasn't so long ago when one, "old-radical" ideological extreme was symbolized by Vladimir Đukanović, a lawyer and political thinker in the making, while the "Maxweberian", neoliberal and "super-ideological" gender was symbolized by the serial minister of all "non-ideological" Zoran Ja Radim I Gradim Mihajlović. Contrary to the iron discipline in the party, which normally always has only one policy - and that is the one on which Aleksandar Vučić got up that morning - Đukanović and Mihajlović were allowed to say the worst about each other (and not privately, but "ideologically" ), moreover, it was easy and transparent that their "conflict" was discreetly encouraged. Does that mean he was "faking"? No, at least not in that banal sense; it was simply about the fact that the mannequins of both political languages were needed by the real center of power just as they are. Which by no means meant that he was somewhere "halfway" between them.
What has changed since then? To the lazy spirits, who update the coordinates once every ten or fifteen years, and in the meantime constantly rock at the same points, it certainly seems that nothing has changed and that it is always the same mafioso gang in power (which is at the lowest level of public affairs, at the level of "black chronicle", quite true, but it is less important than it seems), but it will not be quite so.
The fact that Zorana Mihajlović is no longer in the SNS or in power does not have to matter, just as she does not have to matter. But, somehow, right at the time when ZM disappeared from the government's radar, it was as if any possibility of a new "Zorana Mihajlović" appearing, a freelance shooter within the Structure who drops anchor whenever the unfortunate Serbian drunken ship leans too far to the east, also disappeared. And if that possibility has disappeared, it means that it has been buried like some mining shaft for exploitation whose owners are no longer interested. Moreover, even some unusual phenomena that to the naive at first could resemble variants of the same Zoran-syndrome (yes, of course I am talking primarily about Ana Brnabić) in the meantime became bigger Đukas than Vladimir Đukanović himself.
Be that as it may, the other ideological pole of the SNS planet did not melt in the meantime, nor was it expelled or silenced, nor did it learn to better control its language, on the contrary. And that can only mean one thing: that at the very least, um, he was encouraged to express and confess his political-ideological-cultural inclinations without softening, euphemisms, self-censorship.
Read Djukanović's latest work in Politics, after the happy author returned from his native Russia, where he was the so-called observer at the so-called elections. The delighted Fiscal from Belgrade writes, and not "between the lines", that Putin's Russia is a mother and a friend and a role model for Serbia as it is and as it is yet to be, and by no means a "rotten West", as he saw in that warm fraternal tyranny from the icy north true freedom, fraternity and equality... Well, you will say, Đuka ko Đuka, did we expect anything else? No, but that's not the point. But in the fact that the world, or at least Europe (Eurasia?) is already deep in an ideological-value war, which in terms of intensity and toxicity is not behind the one we used to call the Cold (and it seems to me that it will soon be overcome). And in which the position of democratic countries is much more vulnerable than in the previous one, because the current Kremlin group is more successful in undermining them from within.
In that distribution of cards, Serbia would stand badly with almost any government, and it stands hopelessly with this one, because it (the government, not Serbia) gradually but unstoppable submission to the control of the Kremlin suits it both pragmatically and ideologically. That's why the time of acting a "non-ideological" (or polyideological) position is forever behind us. And that's why there is no more foolish idea than that you can fight against the "Serbian regime" while at the same time admiring the Russian one. If something doesn't change quickly and drastically, don't worry, the "Serbian regime" will die by itself. But not in the way liberal fantasists had hoped. But by learning Russian, better than Serbian, which was never their strong point anyway.
