It’s time to stop backing Serbia’s autocratic leader and embrace his country’s democratic aspirations.

“If you think I’m going to flee like Assad, you’re wrong.” At least he admitted there was a parallel. Serbia’s autocratic President Aleksandar Vucic is facing the largest wave of popular protests in the country since the fall of his former boss Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. 

Vucic has blood on his hands: on 1 November, a train station canopy in Novi Sad – shoddily renovated as part of a financially opaque government project – collapsed, killing 15 people. In the weeks since, public anger at years of misrule has spilled onto the streets. Crowds sometimes numbering over 100,000 rend the winter air with furious chants before falling silent for 15-minute vigils – one minute for each life lost to the regime’s unrestrained greed. Students have occupied most university buildings in the country, transforming them into hubs of political self-organization. Vucic’s threats of retaliation via a mysterious paramilitary force have fallen flat: Serbs from all walks of life stand with the students. 

But the West doesn’t. In the final years of Milosevic’s rule, Western countries actively supported the democratic opposition. Now, they play deaf to the cries of the Serbian people. Why? 

Firstly, the West is betting on Vucic’s eventual recognition of the sovereignty of Kosovo, which unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008. This is unbelievably naïve. Vucic was chief propagandist under Milosevic, who later faced trial for (among other charges) war crimes in Kosovo. The internationally wanted suspect in the attack on a village in northern Kosovo in 2023, Milan Radoicic, is a close business associate of Vucic’s brother. As Western negotiators swallow Vucic’s empty promises to resolve the Kosovo dispute, domestic propaganda casts him as a valiant defender of Serbdom who will never compromise over the territory. 

Credit for this irrational gamble goes in large part to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who spearheaded Western endorsement of Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) – an ostensibly pro-European, neoliberal spinoff of convicted war criminal Vojislav Seselj’s Serbian Radical Party. SNS was seen as the likeliest facilitator of Kosovo’s independence, a step regarded as a postulate for regional stability and the ultimate vindication of the U.S.-UK war effort against Serbia. While Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the leaders at the time, have enjoyed advisory gigs with SNS, the Kosovo issue will continue to stagnate for as long as Vucic remains in power. 

Everything Up for Grabs

Now for the darker side of the story. Vucic, kleptocrat par excellence, has put Serbia up for sale – and Western countries are among his many customers. There’s enough to go around: from Belgrade’s Savamala neighborhood, bulldozed in the middle of the night and sold to Emirati developers; to state oil company NIS, from which Russia has long extracted enormous profits; to the copper mine in Bor, which China’s Belt and Road Initiative operates as one of the most polluted places in Europe. Prospects of tender-free, direct deals with the regime attract such diverse players as U.S. construction giant Bechtel and French President Emmanuel Macron, who visited Belgrade in August to peddle Rafale fighter jets.

The hottest attraction in Vucic’s playground is the Jadar valley, where the EU enthusiastically backs a Rio Tinto lithium mine that threatens to poison the local ecosystem and contaminate the water supply of around 2.5 million people downstream. As the nation took to the streets in protest last summer, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz celebrated the project as a major boon for Europe’s green transition. Clearly Scholz sees Serbia’s environment as a casualty, not a beneficiary, of this transition.

But such disappointing hypocrisy is nothing new. Though there have been no fair elections in Serbia since 2012, SNS enjoys associate membership in the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), the largest bloc in the European Parliament. International criticism flares up occasionally – in response to what many charged were rigged elections in 2023, for instance – but in the absence of any sustained pressure to democratize, sharp words rebound harmlessly. 

Meanwhile, Vucic is running Serbia to the ground. Virtually all levels of government are stuffed with incompetent SNS cronies. With the secret service, the army, and most media firmly under its control, the party is free to embezzle to its heart’s content. Its most ambitious scheme yet is Belgrade’s Expo 2027, which has an outrageous stated budget of nearly 18 billion euros, equivalent to 21 percent of Serbian GDP (by contrast, World Expo 2020 in deep-pocketed Dubai cost 6.7 billion euros).

The West fills the discursive vacuum left by indefensible policy with disingenuous blather. Take, for instance, the British ambassador to Belgrade, who assured Serbs in July that their fears over the Jadar mine were unfounded, since lithium mining happens safely in his home country – failing to acknowledge that in Serbia, unlike in the UK, politicians and corporations operate unconstrained by democratic accountability and independent regulation. Or his U.S. counterpart, who recently remarked that Vucic’s Serbia was “going in the right direction,” even as tens of thousands forsook their beloved New Year’s Eve festivities to continue protesting. “There‍ is no new year,” ran the bitter slogan, “you still owe us last year.”

It’s time for Western countries to abandon Vucic and embrace the democratic aspirations of the Serbian people. The tradeoff: lose an autocrat supplying dirty business opportunities and geopolitical illusions, and score a major win for European democracy and regional stability. 

Rade Meech-Tatic is a Serbian student at the University of Cambridge and the founder of the environmental NGO Cempres.