Vučić's forced meetings: About 20 percent of people desert

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić promised that he would meeting in Jagodina people attend voluntarily. That should be it SNS response to the hitherto unprecedented wave of protests in Serbia, which this Friday (January 24) was marked by a "general strike".

However, reports and testimonies about "quotas" for forcibly bringing people to Jagodina are multiplying.

"They started conditioning people to go to Jagodina. In my company, there has been talk for days about the fact that on Friday, at 14 p.m., several buses will leave for Jagodina. They called me too, but I definitely won't go," a source from Niš told us, who asked not to mention his name.

This is the manner of the Serbian Progressive Party, confirmed several times so far.

How to escape from a rally

This reporter, in front of an SNS pre-election meeting in the Belgrade Arena, once watched people from hundreds of buses, illegally parked along the boulevard in New Belgrade, trying to dodge the rally.

"Come on, they can't do anything to us," one young man encouraged his group. Is that running away from the rally? "I'm running, brother, what am I going to do there."

They say they are from a small town in central Serbia, employed in a local hospital. "By necessity, we were put on the list. What can I tell you, brother."

Even those who claim to support Vučić do not hide that they came organized - very organized. One man said that he was a teacher in a small town in Vojvodina.

"Look, I'm here because that's the kind of person I am, moral." When I have already joined the party, I will then support it to the end."

He joined in order to preserve the fund of lessons because "in this country it doesn't work any other way, everything is through the party", everything is freaky and we are the wrong example for our children.

Counter-rally again

Before the famous counter rally in May 2023, with which Vučić tried to respond to the protests after two mass murders in "Ribnikar" and the villages of Mladenovac, Aleksandar Gubaš from the Archive of Public Meetings, which counts the protesters, spoke to "Vreme".

"Buses cannot be parked in the city center, but on the outskirts - and then it happens that people sleep, go to cafes, lie on the fields in New Belgrade, and don't go to the meeting at all," he said.

As Gubaš estimates, the biggest Vučić rally so far was the one in January 2019, when the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, was brought in front of the Church of Saint Sava.

At that time, he says, there were about thirty thousand people in front of the Temple, while another ten thousand remained on Slavija in front of the big video wall.

"But then I found unexpected collateral information: Vučić brought more people to Belgrade then. Some fifty thousand people passed by our measuring point towards Slavija - they were channeled, surrounded by metal fences and could not run into the side streets."

But by the time of the meeting, they still dispersed. This means that the quota of "deserters" is about twenty percent.

The SNS sometimes tries to prevent this by, as once in Pancevo, literally surrounding the gatherings with metal fences and keeping security guards there. They question people who want to leave, instilling fear.

As Dragan Popović from the Center for Practical Politics assessed this week, the meeting in Jagodina is a counter rally and the application of old methods in new times.

"Which I think is quite stupid, I don't know what other word to use." "I believe that they have exhausted almost all the methods they could use to suppress dissatisfaction in Serbia," Popović told "Vreme".