After the citizens last night during protest at Slavija they glued the entrance Expo 2027 companies "Students are winning" stickers, the organizers of the exhibition decided to respond with a message: Expo belongs to everyone.
This message speaks of two things: first, there are obviously people in the Expo team who still think a little smarter about marketing than their neighbors from Ćaciland; secondly, the government is campaigning to present a large state project as a "common space for all citizens", even though the Expo itself has become one of the central topics of political and social divisions in Serbia in recent months.
Seductive message
However, no matter how seductive the message "Expo belongs to everyone" sounds in terms of marketing, the impression remains that the government is trying to present the project, which has been promoted almost exclusively through the party and propaganda machinery for years, as the common good of all citizens. And when public projects turn into political symbols of government, then protest stickers on their doors become an inevitable part of public discussion.
Despite the strong presence of the police and attempts by the regime media to downplay the significance of yesterday's gathering, the protest in Slavija turned into another demonstration of the deep social discontent that has been spreading in Serbia in recent months. Thousands of citizens from different parts of the country flocked to the center of Belgrade carrying the slogans "Students win" and "No surrender", while the students said that the protest is no longer just a student issue, but a fight for a "normal state".
Discrepancy in estimates
Estimates of the number of people gathered attracted special attention. While the Ministry of Internal Affairs announced that there were about 34.300 people at the protest, the Archive of Public Meetings published an estimate that between 180 and 190 thousand people were present at the "You and I, Slavija" rally.
For a part of the public, this gap between official estimates and scenes from the field has become a symbol of the political atmosphere in which the government tries to minimize the scale of social resistance. In this context, even the student messages pasted on the doors of Expo 2027 act as much more than a simple performance as a reminder that no major state campaign can any longer function in isolation from the political reality in which it originates.
When it comes to Expo exhibitions, the situation is further complicated by the fact that such projects are almost as a rule the subject of serious social and political polemics in all host countries, from Italy and Spain to Japan, where even the organization of Expo 2025 in Osaka, despite a high degree of institutional organization, opened debates about costs, urban planning priorities and the relationship of the state to the public interest.
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