A protest movement led by students in Serbia has joined more than 100,000 people for a huge peaceful street demonstration on Saturday in the capital of Serbia, Belgrade, defying the warnings from the country’s forts of men, that months of troubles were uncontrollable of violence.
The rally on Saturday, the greatest outpouring public dissatisfaction in Serbia for decades has been preceded by a warr of warnings by President Aleksandar Vucic and his vast media apparatus according to which the demonstrators planned violent attacks to provoke “civil war” and seize power.
Opposition politicians added a disturbing humor by saying that they had received information from the interior of the Serbia security service from the secret plans to stop Mr. Vucic’s political rivals.
But the rally on Saturday, which started outside the parliament building in Belgrade and quickly swallowed up the city center, went without major incident. The supporters of President Vucic gathered in a park near the parliament and threw stones on the students. But the fear that the government will deploy war veterans and football hooligans linked to organized crime gangs to beat the demonstrators – as it has done in the past – has not materialized.
Belgrade police said that demonstrators had 107,000 while students from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at the University of Belgrade, who helped organize the rally, put the participation rate at 800,000.
The demonstrations in Serbia, which have spread across the country, reaching cities which voted in the past strongly for Vucic, began in November after 15 people were killed by the collapse of a concrete canopy in a recently renovated station. The students and the opposition politicians – who protested dramatically last week by triggering lighting rockets and smoking bombs in Parliament – blamed the tragedy of poor quality work of entrepreneurs linked to corrupt officials.
While the students focused on a set of clear requests related to the disaster, including the criminal prosecution of officials and the rejection of ministers who supervised the renovation project, Mr. Vucic’s political opponents in Parliament demanded that he form a “transitional government” to supervise new elections.
The previous elections, held under the supervision of the Serbian Progressive Party Director, were tainted by electoral fraud and government control over the main television and information media, which enabled it to silence the messaging of opposition candidates mainly. Vucic said he was ready to hold an election but excluded a “transitional government” which would include his opponents.
While the demonstrations have grown and attracted support far beyond the campuses, which have been barricaded for months, they have increasingly targeted Mr. Vucic, who has been in power for 13 years, many demonstrators now calling for his withdrawal and even imprisonment.
“Vucic arrest,” sang the demonstrators on Saturday. “He finished,” read signs worn by some of them.
The political crisis in Serbia, where President Trump’s son -in -law, Jared Kushner, worked on a complicated affair for a luxury Trump brand hotel in the center of the capital, poses a dilemma for the new American administration.
Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the United States sought to court Mr. Vucic from the partnership traditionally close to Serbia with Russia and were criticized by opposition politicians to be too soft on the Serbian president.
The Trump administration does not show any signs of Mr. Vucic. Tuesday, Vucic met the president’s son Donald Trump Jr., who made a previously unexpected visit to Belgrade. The Serbian President, embarked by the dismantling of President Trump of the USAID assistance agency, who had helped financial groups that documented electoral fraud and other abuses in Serbia, sent the armed police last month to attack Belgrade offices from non -governmental organizations which he blamed for displeasure.
