Serbia is a paragon of authoritarian neoliberalism

Lily Lynch

Vučić began his political career as a member of the Radical Party of Serbia, a far-right party that was known in the 1990s for its very close ties to state security services. It was almost used by Milošević as a way to portray himself as a moderate figure, because the radicals were so extreme and so far to the right.

Vučić effectively served as Milošević’s minister of information in the final years of his rule and became notorious as a zealous persecutor of critical journalists. He learned early on that controlling Serbia’s media was essential to maintaining power, and he also understood the need to maintain close relations with organized crime and deep-state security services.

He was an extreme figure, famously saying during the Bosnian war: “We will kill a hundred Muslims for every one Serb.” Such statements made him a highly odious figure, both to the domestic opposition and to non-Serbs elsewhere in the region. He remained a rising star in the Radical Party until the period after the fall of Milošević, when they went into opposition.

This continued until the mid-2000s and the latter part of the decade. That period was the peak of support for EU membership in Serbia: people saw their future as in the EU, regardless of their political orientation.

Yet the Radical Party, of which Vučić was a leading member, had always been hostile to the EU. After the 2008 elections, when the Radicals lost to the Democratic Party, the liberal, centre-left group associated with figures like Zoran Đinđić, they realised that they had to change their behaviour if they ever wanted to come to power.

Another important thing that happened in 2008 was that Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Of course, Serbia still does not recognize Kosovo’s independence to this day. There was strong opposition to Kosovo’s independence from Serbian nationalists, including Vojislav Koštunica, who was prime minister at the time. The exact circumstances of what happened are disputed, but essentially Koštunica allowed nationalists to attack and burn down the US embassy.

As a result of that incident, American diplomats decided that it was essential to ensure that Koštunica would lose the next election. They believed that Washington had to somehow manipulate the Serbian political landscape to ensure that this man understood that he could not allow the American embassy to be attacked. They encouraged the leader of the Socialist Party of Serbia, Milošević’s old party, to split from the Radicals and join the Democratic Party.

At the same time, there was an idea among American officials, particularly then-Ambassador Cameron Munter. They said to themselves, “What if we had a right-wing party that was pro-US and pro-EU?” — because Serbia is of course generally a very nationalistic country and the majority of people tend to be quite conservative nationalists.

The idea was that someone with nationalist credentials could get things done in a way that the Democratic Party could not. What I am talking about here is primarily the issue of resolving the disputed status of Kosovo and normalizing relations between Serbia and Kosovo.

At this point, Vučić and another high-ranking member of the Radical Party, Tomislav Nikolić, decided, quite opportunistically, to form a splinter party. They broke with the Radicals and formed the Serbian Progressive Party, which has dominated Serbian politics for the past twelve years. It started with the idea that they should embrace a pro-EU policy. This was strongly encouraged by the US, who thought that they could infringe on Serbian nationalists who had previously been very anti-American and anti-Western.

In 2012, there was an election that the Serbian Progressive Party won, and Vučić’s political partner Nikolić became president. At that time, Vučić only held the position of deputy prime minister. But he soon began to amass enormous power through a multiplication of roles. At one point, he was deputy prime minister, minister of defense, and head of the BIA (Security Intelligence Agency), the security service, all at the same time. He also ended up purging all of Nikolić’s people from high positions within the party and re-staffing those positions with his own loyalists.

At the same time, you had a tabloidization of the Serbian media in those years, which was always lacking, even under the Democratic regime. Most of the media became a mouthpiece for Vučić, with small pockets of opposition media. The Democratic Party, which had been the dominant force in Serbian politics after Milošević, was crushed and now has a very low level of public support. Vučić was very talented (and remains very talented) at creating divisions within the opposition in order to divide and conquer.

He also embarked on a populist anti-corruption crusade in those early years in power, arresting so-called oligarchs — we would call them tycoons — and exploiting righteous anger at the Democratic Party, which had overseen the criminal privatization process. Channeling that anger was a sensible political strategy. This was the immediate post-global financial crisis period, and he was able to stoke resentment toward the center-left forces that had been in power since Milošević fell. This approach ultimately proved very successful for him.