It's been months. Zorana Mihajlovic she called the students fascists, dilettantes, wretches, liars who manipulate people with the story of "innocent, free-thinking student children" and mistreat her and all of Serbia.
Since none of the regime media invited her to the shows, and the tabloids ignored her, she started self-promotion on Instagram - it costs nothing and no one has to invite her. A Aleksandar Vučić no way to look back or mention her name.
The experienced politician, who has been working hard in the progressive system for a decade, knew that she just had to continue praising Vučić, the president's "enemies", and put herself and her image as a second-Serbian favorite, "the only one even remotely correct among the terrible SNS", at the disposal of the head of state, so that DJ Vučićević and others like him knock on her door again.
The tabloids quickly arrived, so in their broadcasts and texts, she began to wish Vučić the best in his fight against the "colored revolution". For these needs, she reconciled with the boss of "Informer", with whom she has been in a dispute for years, and who himself called her names in November 2024, when her arrests began due to the fall of the canopy.
"Where is Zorana Mihajlović, who was a minister at the time? Does anyone mention her and why not," Vučićević said in a guest appearance on Pink TV.
Nevertheless, a few months later, Mihajlovic had no problem thanking "Informer" for caring for the president, making a guest appearance on television and calling Vučić "a gladiator who always fights for his country."
He saw her.
And indeed, she did not wait long, the first man of Serbia needed her. Having nowhere and how to fight against the students in the blockade, the rebellious people and, above all, raising awareness of the SNS and SPS, Vučić called her name.
In a guest appearance on Informer television, he hinted that the former vice-president of the party is returning to SNS.
"I am unusually strict with my party, and there were other parties that resisted the revolution, but you can't find any that left the party in such difficult times. And even some, like Mrs. Mihajlović, are returning," explained Vučić.
When asked if it is true that she is back among the progressives, whom she criticized when she left the party, even asking them to delete her name from the SNS database, Mihajlović says that she is not.
"I'm not in a party, but I love my country, and I support the president's policy of developing, preserving and caring for the country," he says.
At the same time, she managed to publish an author's text for Politika, a newspaper that was never in her favor, because it is pro-Russian oriented, and she, ostensibly, works for the West.
What does Zorana Mihajlović need, and what do the progressives need?
In "Politica", the former minister and SNS official writes about the accusations against the reconstruction of the railway from Belgrade to Budapest and her communication with the president's office. He compares the protests against the project to Luddism, a 19th-century movement when people blamed machines for unemployment.
Mihajlović was also the Minister of Construction when the decision was taken on the reconstruction project of the Railway Station in Novi Sad, but no one mentioned her anywhere later, nor was she held accountable. Except for one Dragan J. Vučićević. She was also called to the police for an interview on this issue, but, she says, only as a witness. For the tragedy, in which 16 people died due to negligence and corruption.
She wrote in "Politics" that she is returning to the public because she refuses to be a "prisoner of manipulated students and that kind of pseudo-anarcho-totalitarian ideologies and pathological politics." It is possible that Mihajlović rather refuses to be a real prisoner, if her eventual responsibility in the entire project in which the canopy collapsed was determined.
The fact that Aleksandar Vučić accepted her back into his flock also says that he needs her very much. Because, in 2023, he sacrificed her and did not appoint her as a minister, which was her position for many years. Her departure from SNS was preceded by numerous quarrels with pro-Russian politicians in Serbia - Aleksandar Vulin, Dušan Bajatović, and even Tomislav Nikolić.
By returning Mihajlović under the umbrella of the SNS, Vučić is probably addressing all those whom she has ever liked, even though they do not like progressives, but potentially also international institutions, such as officials in Brussels, who occasionally cancel meetings with him or are not as cordial as expected.
On-call corrective of progressive blackness
"Since Aleksandar Vučić spectacularly resurrected in our lives, there she is somewhere around him, as an on-call corrective, as an allegedly unequivocal symbolic proof that Serbia has not moved out of its home continent, even the planet, and that everything will be fine in the end," Teofil Pančić wrote in "Vremen" when Zorana Mihajlović left SNS.
"Now," continues Pančić, "the fact that nothing in these ten years has ever looked like anything will ever be okay, that's a specific law of dramaturgy: the happy ending is the strongest if things seemed hopeless before."
"It's just that there's no happiness here, and it seems that the only one who is genuinely surprised and offended by this is Zorana Mihajlović herself. So that it doesn't even appear that she wasn't surprised and offended enough, the SNS Information Service made sure that already in the first hours of the minister's still informal 'ex', she began to express herself with the cynicism and contempt long reserved for the opposition and other dubious elements."
A short biography of Zorana Mihajlović
She received her doctorate in economics in Belgrade. It was originally a member of G17 plus. One of the founders of SNS, a long-time minister of energy, who was in constant conflict with Dušan Bajatović, the director of Srbijagas, and who allegedly advocated for Serbia to become less energy dependent on Russia. However, she never implemented her ideas.
From the position of Minister of Energy, she moved to the position of Minister of Construction, allegedly again due to the dispute with Russia.
She left SNS in 2023, allegedly because the European path of progressives was stopped, so she formed her own movement that never took off.
She began to slowly fall into oblivion. Until the student protests, when she again started pushing herself to get the word out.
