Frederik Haber
On 1 November, the canopy of the Novi Sad railway station collapsed, killing 15 people.. On 22 December 2024, more than 100,000 people gathered in the central Slavia Square in Belgrade. Almost all of the country’s faculties were soon occupied, with students at all levels being the driving force behind the movement Though the collapsed station roof was the trigger, the reasons for it run deeper.
What are they and what are the prospects for the movement?
The station disaster and corruption
The rally in Belgrade therefore began with a 15-minute tribute to the victims. The blame for the disaster was placed on the government. The public prosecutor’s office was called upon to investigate the case. The station had been renovated as part of a Chinese-led modernisation of Serbia’s rail infrastructure. The Belgrade-Budapest route via Novi Sad is also part of the ‘New Silk Road’. Work had begun in 2021, and the station was inaugurated during the 2022 election campaign. However, the renovation took until July 2024 to complete, when local authorities declared that the station had now been renovated ‘to European standards’.
The Serbian Ministry of Construction had classified the renovation documents as confidential, which increased the mistrust of the protesters; they accuse the government of covering up alleged sloppiness in the work and of being corrupt in deference to China.
The accusation of corruption is as popular as it is banal in the exploited and dependent countries of Southeast and Eastern Europe. The governments are dependent on foreign investors and institutions that exploit these countries or seek to make them politically compliant. This brings little good and many disadvantages for the population. So every government distributes the small benefit it brings among those sections of the population that support its position in power.
Corruption is a systemic component of a dependent, exploited country i.e. a semi-colony. So every opposition party and every protest movement accuses the incumbent government of corruption.
Has Aleksandar Vučić, the president of Serbia since 2017, personally enriched himself through this systemic corruption, as many suspect? He denies it, of course. But it would be small wonder if he had. Not because he governs in Serbia and Serbia is in the Balkans, but because he is a bourgeois politician and thus has the power to control the distribution of public funds.
Germans will remember that in 2020-21 payments of €50 million each were made to Christian Democrat and Christian Social politicians for ‘advising’ and ‘mediating’ the state agencies in the purchase of Covid masks, and Britons will recall the scandal of a top Conservative Party donor and parliamentary candidate securing £200 million in contracts for PPE equipment for a company he and his wife were associated with.
The anger over the negligent killing of 15 people is fully justified. The accusation of corruption on its own is rather a helpless one. A movement that stops at corruption will not achieve the goal of a non-corrupt government – regardless of whether corruption is suppressed or even whether it overthrows the incumbent government and replaces it with another bourgeois government. Corruption will continue. What is needed is a struggle that can eliminate the system that produces incidents like the one in Novi Sad. What is needed are appropriate demands and actions.
Economic situation
The 2008/9 crisis threw Serbia into depression from which it did not emerge for five years. Since 2015, however, GDP has been growing steadily, with the exception of the Covid year 2020. On average, the increase is around 3.6% per year. An important factor explaining this is the increase in foreign direct investment (FDI), which is going disproportionately into industrial and mining projects. China’s share of this FDI is continuously increasing; in 2024, China became the largest investor and is also gaining as a trading partner, with Serbia exporting mainly copper to China. EU countries still provided a little more investment, but much of this came from the Netherlands; behind this are simply international corporations based there.
This means that Serbia has also come to the attention of major imperialist global players. The USA is threatening to impose sanctions on the country because of continued economic relations to Russia, which is its main supplier of oil. The Russian Foreign Ministry was also quick to warn of a Western inspired ‘colour revolution’ in the wake of the Belgrade protests. On July 24, Germany, which had paid little attention to Serbia for decades, sent Chancellor Olaf Scholz and an EU delegation to sign an agreement over the largest lithium deposit in Europe, which is located in the Jadar Valley.
The British-Australian mining giant, Rio Tinto, had secured the mining rights there several years ago, but after massive protests by the Serbian environmental movement and the local population, the government changed the planning regulations in 2022 to make mining impossible. However, the company did not give up and continued to buy up land. At the beginning of July 24, the Serbian constitutional court suspended the 2022 decision.
On 19 July, Scholz came to Belgrade with the Vice-President of the European Commission, Maros Sefcovic, to sign the relevant contracts with Vucic. According to Vucic, Scholz also promised him the construction of a battery factory and mentioned Mercedes, VW and Stellantis, as well as Korean interest. Incidentally, China had also made efforts: Xi had already been to Belgrade with the same goal in May, though apparently without success.
On the surface, it looks as if Vucic has managed to play off the EU and China against each other to the benefit of Serbia. In fact, he has sold a fertile landscape in the northwest of the country, along with its rivers and the livelihoods of its inhabitants. The profits from the mining and battery factory will go to Britain, Germany, Italy and Korea, and from there into the pockets of the shareholders.
But if the Constitutional Court overturns the 2022 planning decision at Vucic’s request, how much hope can there be that the public prosecutor will intervene in the case of the collapsed station roof? In the case of the factories that China had recently bought in Serbia, it demanded that Serbian labour law be suspended there. The parliament in Belgrade hastily suspended the applicable laws and along with them the rights of trade unions.
From popular protest to class struggle
For socialists and communists, it must be clear that attempts to play off one imperialist power against another or to favour one can only have short-term success. Just as when employees change jobs to another company, that is not a fight for wage increases either.
As positive as it would be if the protest movement were to overthrow Vucic, any successor would be subject to the same constraints of the capitalist system and the imperialist world order. Indeed, there is even a danger that imperialist powers will instrumentalise, abuse and destroy such popular movements. Even though we strongly reject the attempts of the Russian Foreign Ministry and Vucic himself to defame the protest movement as being controlled from the outside, the example of the Maidan in 2014 shows that a lot of money and the use of a small but determined group, the Ukrainian extreme right and fascists, can hijack a legitimate but diffuse movement.
Vucic and the ruling class in Serbia have a long history of exploiting nationalism for their own purposes. In a TV show, where he promised that ‘by March 31, the citizens of Serbia will see the fiercest fight against corruption in the last 24 years’ Vucic also asked ‘Who supported the protests? Did Albin Kurti support them? Openly and publicly in Zagreb. Did all Croatian politicians and media side with the protests with a brutal campaign?’. Thus Vucic connects the movement to the “national enemies”, Croatia and the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, to discredit it.
These words also show the second function of nationalism: to divert attention from the exploitation and encroachment of the imperialist countries and their corporations on the Serbian population and their rights. It is completely justified when Serbian trade unionists or the population of the Jadar Valley point out the aspect of national oppression in the actions of Chinese or German imperialists, for example in the slogan ‘Ne damo Jadar’ ‘We don’t surrender Jadar’.
But Kurti is not responsible for the appalling conditions at the ‘Cukaru Peki’ mine of the Zijin Mining Group Co. in Bor, Serbia, or for the construction of the Linlong tyre factory in Zrenjanin, or for the expulsion of the population in the Jadar Valley.
And nor will there be any fight against these imperialist encroachments when Vucic promises, ‘There will be more countries that will withdraw the recognition of Kosovo, countries from the wonderful continents – Africa and Asia.’
Socialists and communists must not only warn against the trap of nationalism, they must also demonstrate a different perspective so that such struggles do not end in a petty-bourgeois democratic impasse. The working class must come into play. Not because it is particularly strong and well organised. It is not so in Serbia, although it is stronger than in some other Balkan countries. But it can make itself independent of the blackmail of international corporations as well as of that of the Serbian bourgeoisie. It can connect with workers in neighbouring countries as well as in imperialist countries for its struggles. A politically and union organised class can exert political and economic pressure through strikes, take governmental power and transform the economy according to the needs of the people and not of the multinational corporations. It is the task of revolutionary socialists to make clear this potential, both through propaganda and by making proposals to activists. Possible approaches include:
- Workers’ inspection: teams of trade unionists, construction experts, railway station employees and the workers involved in the construction should inspect the station. If the workers are Chinese migrant workers, the Chinese embassy should finance an entry visa and guarantee freedom from repression. All plans and contracts for the railway construction must be made public so that they can be reviewed to avoid similar cases.
- In the case of the Jadar Valley, we propose an international conference of environmental activists, delegates from the local population and trade unionists from other Rio Tinto mines and from the European car industry. The European Trade Union Confederation, the international trade union federation for industry and mining, should organise and finance this conference.
Such a conference should decide whether there should be mining or not. If Rio Tinto is expropriated in the event of mining, it should be expropriated without compensation and under workers‘ control.
At such a conference, it should be decided whether there should be extraction or not. Should Rio Tinto be continued, it should be expropriated without compensation and under workers‘ control.
It would be very important for the movement to call on the company and central trade unions to intervene and campaign in future actions. A connection between the student movement and the working class would also significantly increase the strength against the government.