For ten years, the SNS-SPS coalition has been carrying out strong militarization of Serbia. While systematically collapsing education, healthcare and the domestic economy, they extract huge profits for private interests through investments in the security sector. They have developed a system of looting state property to perfection. Let's remember that, along with Poland, Serbia has the largest investments in the military in Europe. At the same time, it is at the very bottom of Europe in terms of investments in education, and educators have been fighting for years for their salaries to reach the level of the average salary in the country.
What kind of world does the Supreme Public Prosecutor's Office live in at a time when the situation in the country is on the verge of civil war? Why is he watching silently as certain individuals put the police and army under the command of private and paramilitary groups? The Supreme Public Prosecutor's Office (SPP) is silent even in the face of several months of explicit incitement to violence, language of hatred and incitement of panic expressed publicly by numerous top state officials, as well as the pyromania with which the government wants to mask the traces of its kleptomania. And now the masters of hypocrisy, after arson and arson, present themselves as firefighters.
TRIO FROM HELL VUCIC, SESELJ, DACIC
Today, the citizens of Serbia can once again watch live, as in a direct broadcast, or an apocalyptic reality show, all those strategic moves that the Serbian government (with the same actors) used in the nineties to start the war in Yugoslavia. Only, this time, organized crime, violence and incitement to war are running through the streets of cities in Serbia, not Croatia or Bosnia and Herzegovina. Hate, anger and revanchism are increasingly prominent and increasingly present part of the motive for the gathering of various groups, and hatred, anger and revanchism are known as fast and powerful generators of destructive energy. It is a sure recipe for escalation of conflict and violence. Unfortunately, the language of hatred and incitement to violence come from the place that has the greatest influence on citizens and almost absolute control of the mass media - the government: "Nationalists who question the patriotism of their fellow citizens are a group that is likely to become violent" (Roth). In the same way that Aleksandar Vučić, Vojislav Šešelj and Ivica Dacić served war propaganda and paramilitary units in the 1990s and pushed Yugoslavia into a civil war, they are now pushing Serbia into a civil war. They have been implementing the same strategy in Serbia for years. First, they put the media and state security under their absolute control, then they reformed the army and the police to the point of being unrecognizable and dysfunctional, throwing top professionals out of service. From hooligans and criminals, organized mainly as fan groups, with the help of henchmen inserted into the state security, they created their paramilitary, and then they introduced these paramilitary formations into official service and a system in which para-uniforms and official ID cards are given to people with a criminal past. A significant and key part of the judiciary is corrupt and blackmailed. That part of the judiciary has been protecting criminals and persecuting fighters for human rights and the rule of law for years. Along the way, they completely paralyzed and devastated the legislative power and subordinated the economy to war profiteering and robbery through public-private "partnership". During all that time, they always appear in public wrapped in the national flag, while their balances on accounts in offshore companies increase exponentially. Everything is completely identical to what they did in the nineties of the last century in Serbia and Yugoslavia. For them, academics and professors, the rectorate of the oldest national university, students, teachers, athletes, everyone who raises their voice... are traitors, Ustasha and terrorists. That decades-long trio of politics of hatred and violence, Vučić-Sešelj-Dacić, in one decade made Serbia first a captive and then a renegade country, a country for which European integration is no longer important, for which it does not matter what it earns from the genocide of the Palestinians, a country where corruption and crime have become the most profitable economic branch, a country where there is the greatest social stratification in Europe and a country with the most mass murders and victims of mass murders in Europe. And now they are so fond of "mafineria" and robbery that the option of civil war is closer to their minds than any other political alternative to their absolutism.
CONSISTENT AGGRESSIVENESS
For ten years, the SNS-SPS coalition has been carrying out strong militarization of Serbia. While systematically collapsing education, healthcare and the domestic economy, they are extracting huge profits for private interests through investments in the security sector. They have developed a system of looting state property to perfection. Let's remember that, along with Poland, Serbia has the largest investments in the military in Europe. At the same time, in terms of investments in education, it is at the very back of Europe, and educators have been fighting for years for their salaries to reach the level of the average salary in the country.
The consistent aggressiveness of the authorities is visible in the expositions of their representatives, in which they clearly presented the vision of Serbian society. The importance and role of the analysis of their expositions stems from one of the key characteristics of language and discourse - the ability to form and shape social reality, because the production of meaning is the way in which social relations and structures are possessed, imposed and controlled. Discourses are inseparable from institutional practices and play a key role in the exercise of power (Foucault, Willig). The tables representing the frequency of certain terms in the exposés of the government representatives presented in the Serbian parliament from 2001 to 2024 clearly show how the current government strategically introduced aggressive and militant rhetoric, while marginalizing the topic of democracy and the rule of law. In that period, Serbia had a total of 14 prime ministerial mandates (8 exposures in the period 2001–2013, versus 6 in the period 2014–2024).
Since 2001 (and perhaps for the last 80 years), no other exposition in Serbia has contained such frequent use of the word victory, war, the army, weapon, attack, survival, fatherland i Bog as an exposition of the mandate of Miloš Vučević from 2024.
At the same time, a whole series of militant and aggressive terms characteristic of the narratives of the militarists in power in Serbia and intensively represented in their political messages was not characteristic of the prime minister's speech in the neighboring countries in the Western Balkans. The tabular presentation shows this in the case of the expositions of the representatives of North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the representatives of Serbia, presented in 2022 (in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it is 2023).
PSYCHOLOGICAL PRESSURE AND CONTAMINATION
Of course, for all the concepts and terms analyzed, there is a very important difference in the context and subtext in which they are represented. For example, while representative Ana Brnabić used the term seven (7) times in her exposé war, Mandate of Montenegro Dritan Abazović war was used in 2 cases, namely in the formulation about illumination of war crimes in the territory of the former Yugoslavia and uncovering the full truth about the role of the citizens of Montenegro in wartime events of the nineties.
This analysis of the frequency of certain terms represented in the exposés of government representatives in Serbia and neighboring countries shows another way in which the social and political climate in Serbia is militarized, and citizens, which includes children and young people, are exposed to ten years of continuous psychological pressure and contamination. This is also confirmation that the change in the political and social climate in Serbia since 2014 does not originate from global or regional geopolitical changes, but rather reflects the political character of the Government of the RS and the ruling party, as well as the psychological characteristics of its members, which is why Serbia is continuously moving away from the rule of law and democratic values (from democracy i of the law), with increasingly distinct characteristics of an autocratic and militant regime.
Such politics mobilize people to action against someone and something. General civilizational progress, cultural and scientific achievements, the improvement of social relations within the community, or the increase of individual freedoms or collective emancipation are either marginalized or outside the optics of the RS Government, which prioritizes the cultivation of warrior values, focused on the "external enemy" and "traitors". In Serbia, the president of the state is increasingly spoken of as a leader and commander-in-chief, citizens have become a nation, the state is the fatherland, homes are hearths, the government is leadership, and public policy is God's will. The "Supreme Commander" is now preparing i great military parade - the largest in the history of Serbia and the Western Balkans.
The author is an international expert on violence prevention and conflict resolution
Why is there nothing else between the overcome regime and the changes? What does the regime mean when it says it is defending Serbia? Why is the Student Movement indomitable? Who has the knowledge and real experience, and who leads without a day of work experience outside of politics? And why students win
After almost two years of protests, hundreds of kilometers walked, arrests, persecution and unprecedented social mobilization, Serbia is holding elections that could mark the end of a political era. Sociologist Marija Babović tells "Vreme" that the hope for change has not been so great since October 5, 2000, but she also warns of the danger that, if changes are not made, the country will face an even tougher authoritarian regime.
Their only weapon now is the media they control: like, we don't have an agenda, which is not true; as, we will betray the national interest, which is not true. One of their arguments is that we are afraid to go to the debate with Vučić. They do not understand that it is their punishment. This is a punishment for Aleksandar Vučić, who for 14 years conducted exclusively a monologue. For fourteen years he did not allow anyone any kind of dialogue, and now he would like to be rewarded or pardoned with the opportunity to talk to us. Well, he won't be able to. What he sowed is now reaping
These elections are not elections about Serbia's membership in the European Union, Kosovo and Metohija, gay marriage, tax policy or any other single political issue. Although parties on the fringes of political power try to impose these themes, at the heart of the upcoming political election is a much simpler dilemma: change or preserve the existing order. For more than a year now, surveys have shown that this is the primary dilemma on the ballot
In the RS, 19.800 people registered for the elections in Serbia, who will be able to vote at 28 polling stations. It remains unknown how many of them will cross the Drina on October 25 and vote in Serbia. In any case, I do not believe that the voters from Republika Srpska are the ones who will decide the winner of the elections in Serbia. Realistically, the voters from Republika Srpska can influence a little, but it seems that they are symbolically very important to both Vučić and the opposition.
There is, literally, no difference between the one who claims it is day in the middle of the night, or the one who claims to be a giraffe, from the claims we read on billboards: that Vučić is working to unify Serbs and that Serbia is doing better and better day by day.
The pre-election arrests due to the alleged "overthrow of the state" testify to the regime's panic. The bad news for them is - they can't arrest the whole people who decided to defend themselves from progressive beatings and election theft
The ring that tightens around Ćaciland Student list is getting narrower. Because there are more and more spoiled people who see the false prophet for what he is: a street obscener who is fighting Serbia
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Will the current SNS & SPS coalition be as disastrous for Serbia as it was for Yugoslavia? And why, whenever the government forms a radical-socialist alliance, the state and society find themselves either in war or on the verge of war? Is it even possible to find (for Serbia, so atypical and ahistorical) a solution to this kind of crisis without major bloodshed?
