Year under the canopy: What awaits Serbia in 2025?

vlast it offers "more of the same" - lies, propaganda, omnipotence - but it will not solve the general crisis into which the regime dragged Serbia. In the new year, the unexpected can be expected, he writes Deutsche says.

By definition, a crisis is a long-term disruption of the functioning of a social, political or economic system. A crisis can lead to an intensification of conflicts in society, but it can also offer solutions.

The government in Serbia has no intention of looking for an essential solution, because it believes that it has already been found by its very existence and dominance, and that all those who think that it is not so are the only problem, with which there is no dialogue about the solution.

The crisis package that Serbia is carrying over into the next year has a greater probability of tightening, rather than calming down.

The crisis has several faces - institutional, media, political, sociocultural and general.

The unresolved conflict with Pristina is a crisis that contains the potential for permanent destabilization.

All crisis branches are only superficially different, but essentially they have the same source: The violent collapse of modernization in the nineties and the impossibility of finding a way in the new millennium to rid the country of that ballast and join stable democratic societies.

Nor does the world context with wars, economic crises, global pandemic paralysis and anti-democratic tendencies in democratic societies favor those who want to establish a democratic and prosperous country.

Crisis of institutions

After November 1, the judicial, executive and legislative authorities showed that institutions such as the prosecution, the government and the parliament are in the all-powerful embrace of the ruling political organization.

The ruling party's crisis management failed. But that failure increased polarization in society and further exposed the dependence of institutions on the political will of the authorities.

In a country where the ruling party decides even who will be employed as a cleaner in a town, that party now pretends to know nothing about its involvement in the decisions that led to the suffering.

Faced with the obvious bankruptcy of the institutional response to the death of fifteen people, in which everything points to a combination of proverbial arrogance, sloppiness and "embedding", citizens begin to realize that none of this is happening to someone else.

A part of society, above all a large part of the student population, wakes up in fear that the arrogance of the government will knock on everyone's door with its consequences.

Another part of society defends the party's acquired access to resources by being aggressive towards the first group.

They are indecisive somewhere in between. They would not risk anything because they are tired of decades of political operations without anesthesia, which led to additional crippling of society, but they can no longer bet that their tacit support of the government will not backfire. If it lasts and deepens, the crisis will force them to declare themselves.

Parapolice repression

The institutional crisis includes not only the non-transparent behavior of the judicial branch of government, but also the selective use of coercive means by the police apparatus.

A visually recognizable stamp on the deep crisis of the police was given by activists of the ruling party under hoods, policemen who turn a man in his eighth decade of life into an invalid with beatings, law enforcement officers with the fashion habits of hooligans.

In a country where police inspectors who discover drug production facilities have more problems with institutions than drug lords, I guess it is normal for civilians dressed as hooligans to arrest students who did not participate in staged orgies of violence at protests.

And for those young people to be sentenced to thirty-day detention by up-to-date judges. That kind of institutional "normality" is reminiscent of the severe deviations of the late one-party order.

The visit of members of the Security and Information Agency to the Republic Institute for the Protection of Monuments is bordering on caricature, in order to silence the voices there who say that the decision of the Government of the Republic of Serbia to remove the protection from the General Staff buildings is illegal.

Intelligence agents intimidate experts when they dare to tell the truth. Or they invite students to "friendly conversations" beyond their competence - that category of invitation does not exist legally.

The police and intelligence agencies illegally use spyware against activists who are critical of the government or against journalists. The illegal and unconstitutional instrumentalization of the intelligence agencies and the police, whether they are in civilian clothes or lined up in equipment to break up demonstrations, is obvious.

Even in the speeches of the president of the state, a clear indirect threat was made about the use of the Special Purpose Military Police Detachment "Cobra" against students. The connection between the police apparatus, violent fan groups and activists and officials of the ruling party was once again openly manifested on the streets of Serbian cities.

The outcome of this tightening is uncertain. Especially since, according to international monitoring, there has been a significant decline in the state of civil liberties in Serbia, as stated in the report of the International Association of Non-Governmental Organizations CIVICUS.

Civic space is obstructed in Serbia, the report says. The right to protest is questioned, sending violent demonstrators and arresting demonstrators, and not arresting violent people are among the usual methods by which the government, abusing the police apparatus and secret services, tries to suppress discontent.

Activists resisting the controversial lithium mining project were also arrested in August. They were accused of "calling for the violent overthrow of the constitutional order".

The government has publicly labeled the resistance to the lithium exploitation project as a conspiracy by foreign secret services with the aim of destabilizing Serbia.

A crisis of legitimacy

The division of power into executive, legislative and judicial is intended to be an essential institutional guarantee for guarding the democratic system against any attempt to usurp power.

On paper, the independent judiciary controls the other two branches of government, the parliament controls the government and passes laws, and the government operates operationally to improve the living conditions of citizens by adhering to constitutional and legal provisions.

In Serbian practice, the partocratic pyramid of power has completely abolished the division of power because all three of its branches essentially depend on the political will that is designed in one center.

A president who turns a parliamentary democracy into a presidential one, contrary to the constitution, is a usurper. That's why organizations like freedom house have long been talking about a "hybrid regime" or a "partially free country" in which "in recent years, the ruling Serbian Progressive Party has been constantly violating political rights and civil liberties, exerting pressure on independent media, political opposition and civil society organizations".

Such regimes maintain a democratic facade, but through media spin, election manipulations, bribery and blackmail, they reach the necessary formal majority.

Their problem in the current crisis is their fantasy of omnipotence. When, in an allegedly all-powerful regime, concrete falls on people's heads, and the regime invents its own eulogies for a very long time, putting its construction feats at the very center of propaganda narratives, then the myth of advanced builders collapses with canopies in front of the eyes of the entire nation.

This could be the beginning of a serious crisis of the government's legitimacy, because a large part of society no longer trusts either its propaganda narrative or its legitimacy.

Translated into everyday language - an increasing number of people believe that the government is lying to them and that it is using illegal means to suppress criticism and cover up corruption within its own ranks.

Society in a disinformation crisis

In the annual "World Media Freedom Index" of Reporters Without Borders, in the previous decade, Serbia fell from 54th place (out of 180 countries) in the 2014 report to even 98th place in the 2024 report.

Those drastic 44 places of failure show how the government is increasingly openly abusing the media - as an instrument of propagandistic imposition of the party's will, as a means of hypnotizing with thrash entertainment and passivizing with vulgar content, and as a "warm rabbit" for dissenters.

Outright lies become a daily means of political struggle, and their effect is multiplied by the government's obedient media, which on a national scale produce a toxic disinformation mixture every day. This is how divisions in society are deepened and hatred towards others is imposed as a virtue.

The disinformation crisis is only a part of the general social crisis, which includes the education and health crisis and the demographic crisis.

Educators are marginalized and humiliated, schools are losing competition with social networks and betting shops. Private universities generally produce staff who cannot be employed anywhere abroad because that degree is worth nothing there, but they can be party implants in the labyrinth of state administration.

People with dubious diplomas have already penetrated every pore of the state apparatus. The doctors are leaving. Who will treat the increasingly elderly population, which spends more and more money on visits to private doctors and expensive medicines?

New Year's crisis package

Although the president of the country does not want to talk about the crisis, all crisis phenomena are carried over into the new year, and the resistance that occurs in hundreds of social pockets and that should be expected in the coming period will probably further expose all the mentioned contradictions.

The authorities will proverbially claim that resistance as a reaction to a bad situation is the cause of a bad situation. They will play the "more of the same" game.

So, more manipulation, more propaganda, more lies, more repression, more megalomaniacal projects with low security standards and transparency, but high profitability for the partner elite.

Or as Transparency Serbia puts it, it will continue to be "a country where the prosecution does not investigate all suspicions of corruption, where billions of euros are spent without the application of anti-corruption mechanisms, and where accountability and transparency systems do not function."

The fragmentation of the opposition is also part of the crisis phenomena of Serbian society. It is under the total attack of the regime media, drilled by "sleepers" who occasionally turn into "flyers", but it is also often paralyzed by the leadership ambitions of spent politicians.

Only a strategy of rejuvenating and consolidating personnel could possibly improve the situation.

The open support of some Western democracies to the autocratic government in Serbia has several reasons. We will only mention the purchase of expensive military equipment and weapons in France, the desire of German automobile concerns to get hold of lithium supplies, and the hope of the Western political elite that, despite quasi-patriotic rhetoric, Belgrade will continue to allow the remnants of Serbian state competences to quietly flow out of Kosovo without significant resistance.

The accession negotiations between Belgrade and Brussels will be further delayed, which corresponds to the cynical tacit agreement that both sides have been applying for a long time: "We pretend to want you, and you also pretend to want us."

The state leadership will continue to stage salary increases as a shortcut to the promised land, but purchasing power in such circumstances will not be able to have a significant growth, especially not in the interior.

However, "more of the same" will not solve the deep crisis. The repressive behavior of the authorities and hate speech from the highest places actually ignited the resistance.

In the new year, Serbia introduces the crisis mode of functioning of the state and society as part of everyday life. The only forecast that could be correct is summed up in a funny saying - this is Serbia, expect the unexpected.