What Vučić discussed with the cabbage stone

At his father's estate in Jajinci, Aleksandar Vučić decided to go out for a duel. As no one answered him, he decided to imagine the interlocutor. He placed a chair in front of him, and on it a picture of Dr. Ilija Srdanović, the first on the "Students win" election list. He also added a cabbage stone, and decided to go out for a duel - a cabbage stone.

 

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A post shared by Aleksandar Vucic (@avucic)

THE ROLE OF THE CHAIR IN POLITICAL LIFE

Talking to an empty chair is not unprecedented. Moreover, it was used in recent history when Vučić was the newly appointed First Vice-President of the Government of Serbia.

The event took place on August 30, 2012 at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. It was the last night of the convention, when Mitt Romney was supposed to officially accept his candidacy for the presidency of the United States against then-President Barack Obama. Clint Eastwood, then an 82-year-old actor and director, was billed as a "surprise special guest" and appeared just before the evening's primetime primetime act.

Instead of a classical speech, Eastwood improvised for 11-12 minutes. He had an empty chair next to him and addressed it as if President Obama was sitting in it. He asked "Obama" questions and reacted to his imagined answers, which the audience did not hear. He touched on unemployment, the war in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Obama's campaign promises in 2008. At one point, he suggested that "Obama" was responding to him with obscenities, which drew laughter from the audience. He finished by shouting his famous movie line "Make my day" from the Dirty Harry series with the audience.

THE ROLE OF THE STONE IN THE PARLIAMENT OF SERBIA

The stone is not a stranger to us either, and not as a weapon, but as an auxiliary tool in political speech.

In October 2017, the then MP Dveri Boško Obradović started reciting Fatherland Đura Jakšić. As there is a line in the song: "And this stone of the land of Serbia, which threatens the sun bursts through the cloud", Obradović recited while holding a stone in his hand, supposedly - a stone from Kosovo. Parliament Speaker Maja Gojković asked him to take the stone out of the hall, and when Obradović tried to hide it under the bench, a break was declared.

WHO DID VUCIC TALK TO?

Aleksandar Vučić, however, did not say where the stone came from, nor what the purpose of the imaginary duel was (from what we saw, we can only conclude that he was playing in his parents' yard), but he did want to talk to the imaginary Srdanović. However, in his part of the duel (we did not hear the chair's answer), Vučić did not deal with Srdanović's statements, but with something Nenad Canak said.

As much as this video may inspire ridicule and astonishment, as much as it may evoke sympathy, it unintentionally proves something else: Vučić and SNS would fundamentally not know how to conduct a debate with representatives of the Student List, so they have to imagine them.

We saw a similar phenomenon on Friday, October 2, in the pre-election debate on TV N1, where Siniša Mali attacked Student List candidate Dejan Šoškić, who was not there at all. It is true that Dušan Nikezić, an economist and a candidate on the "European Serbia" electoral list, was present, but the main competitor of the SNS in these elections is the Student List.

THE ROLE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

Talking with an empty chair is probably the best-known technique in Gestalt psychotherapy. It was popularized by Fritz Perls, one of the founders of Gestalt therapy, in the fifties and sixties of the last century. The client sits in front of an empty chair and imagines that a person with whom he has an unresolved relationship is sitting in it. Then he addresses her directly, in the first person and in the present tense ("I'm mad at you because..."), instead of talking about her to the therapist.

Only another person does not have to be "seated" in the chair. It can also be a part of the client themselves, for example their inner critic or the part that is afraid, or even a feeling or symptom. The variant with two chairs, in which the client talks between two opposing parts of himself, is known as the two-chair technique. There, Perls described the famous conflict between the "top dog" (the demanding, moralizing part) and the "underdog" (the part that gets away and resists).

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