Students are not the Khmer Rouge.

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Anyone who followed Branko Milanović on social networks in the past days could learn a lot about Fr student protests and political life in Serbia. From the latest text we learn that they are a spontaneous rebellion students and the demand for judicial accountability for the massive corruption and shoddy public works – which it caused 16 people die - understandable and welcome; however, as soon as the protests spread, problems arose. Students practice anti-politics, reject ties with the opposition, decide directly at plenums, and the movement ("which doesn't even have a name") issues statements from the "Olympic heights". Other critics had already accused the students of being secret admirers of Georges Sorel and the anarchists; Milanović only states that such anti-politics are supported by Slavoj Žižek and Yanis Varoufakis.

The amorphous mass of students and citizens, without formal organization, continues Milanović, thoroughly destabilizes political life. The movement, which operates in secret, looks more like the Khmer Rouge, an extreme communist movement held responsible for the death and expulsion of millions of people in Cambodia, than "Solidarity", a resistance movement of workers, peasants and intellectuals against communist rule in Poland. By refusing to openly engage in political struggle, student protests not only fail to initiate fundamental political changes, but directly provoke the repression of the authorities and thereby encourage the establishment of an open dictatorship. Although corrupt, Vučić and his party won power several times in free elections, and dissatisfied citizens equally do not tolerate either the government or a divided opposition.

STATE OF AFFAIRS

Is that right? Let me start from the back, from the assessment of Vučić's government. It's really not about the old, one-party authoritarianism from the last century, which was based on ideology and mass repression. Today, authoritarianism is most often multi-party, without ideology, and rests on sophisticated media manipulation and selective repression. Such regimes are usually called mixed or competitive authoritarian regimes, such as Hungary under Orban, Turkey under Erdogan or Serbia under Vučić. Some call them spin-dictatorships, although they also include much more repressive regimes - Putin's in Russia or Nazarbayev's in Kazakhstan. In mixed regimes, elections are multi-party and competitive, but not free and fair because there is a drastic inequality between the government and the opposition. Media freedoms are consistently violated, and the authorities abuse all public institutions and public assets for party and private purposes and against the opposition.

Serbia has not been a democratic country for ten years. All television stations with national coverage systematically ignore the opposition and other critics of the government and present propaganda bulletins of the ruling party. Public services RTS and RTV mostly stop there, and Pink and Happy also persecute all those who dared to criticize the government, with a heavy dose of hate speech. Free and fair political competition does not exist as the ruling party has harnessed political institutions and the entire public sector in the fight against the opposition for years - from the executive, legislative and judicial authorities to local self-governments, public institutions and public enterprises. Democratic opposition parties won a large number of votes in undemocratic elections, despite being systematically targeted by the ruling party, security services and regime media.

It is not just about authoritarian rule, but about personal power without ideology, a system in which all key decisions are made in one office, and all public goods have been abused for years in defense of the president's rating. Contrary to authoritarian regimes with strong state institutions and/or party organizations, i.e. regimes based on certain rules and meritocracy, here the rule is arbitrary and key decisions depend on the whims of one person. Extreme corruption is the product of precisely such arbitrary and dissolute government. Just since the beginning of November, we have witnessed such "corruption that kills" when 15 citizens died in Novi Sad and 11 citizens in fires in homes for the elderly in Vojka and Barajevo.

THE BIGGEST STUDENT PROTEST IN EUROPE SINCE 1968.

In such a milieu, after a month of protests by the opposition and self-organized citizens, student protests broke out. It is now clear that this is the largest student protest in Serbia and the region in history, and probably the largest student protest in Europe after 1968. Students have been blocking all faculties of all five state universities for more than three months. They organized five protests, each individually larger than the October 5, 2000 citizen demonstrations that brought down Milosevic. About five percent of the citizens of this country participated in the last protest in Belgrade on March 15, which is an unprecedented event in the region, but also outside the region. With their marches and hikes across the country, the students awakened the citizens and encouraged them to mass revolt against the authoritarian government.

Is it about secrecy (and ideological purity) worthy of the Khmer Rouge? Inappropriate comparisons aside, the choice of plenum and direct democracy is obviously of a situational type. Plenums were used by students during the blockade of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in 2009, and then by students in Sarajevo and Tuzla in 2014 and Skopje in 2016. What is more natural than using the experiences of peers from the neighborhood? The difference is that the students' demands there concerned above all higher education and student standards, while here the issues of broader public importance dominate.

Students emphasize direct democracy and deliberation as additional channels of political participation, not as a substitute for representative democracy. The anonymity of the plenum made it easier to resist the undemocratic government, which is based on selective repression, i.e. on political, security and media coverage and targeting of prominent individuals. From that point of view, the student protests resemble the "Solidarity" movement, which successfully opposed the repressive and centralized party state with highly decentralized engagement.

Should students make concrete political demands or establish a political party? It is no coincidence that students have so far rejected such proposals. Since it is the broadest possible movement, students have different ideological orientations and organizational affiliations. Insisting on a more concrete political program could threaten the very foundations of the student movement, which managed to expose the nature of the undemocratic, corrupt and arbitrary government with its concrete ("apolitical"?) demands.

The political context is significantly different from the one in which the movements of resistance to the repressive Cold War regimes operated. Despite the dominant undemocratic features, political life in Serbia still involves multi-party competition, and there is a democratic opposition that enjoys the trust of a significant, though still minority, part of the electorate. After several months of absence, it is time for the opposition to come out on the public stage, highlight political demands and actively participate in mobilizing resistance to the undemocratic government.

Some political demands have already crystallized in public. An interim government, composed of experts and representatives of the ruling and opposition parties, could fulfill the remaining student demands and prepare free and fair elections within a few months. Students wouldn't mind.

A big gap has opened between the formal political control of political and public institutions by the ruling party and the reality in which they can no longer make and implement political decisions. That political vacuum, which is the source of great instability, should be filled as soon as possible by a temporary government and closed by democratic elections.

Milanović suggests that this wave of protests by students and citizens will most likely end in chaos, repression and dictatorship. We have seen in the previous days that the president of the republic and his loyalists really do not choose the means to stop the protests. The only question is whether citizens should give up protecting their rights through peaceful and non-violent protests and endure an authoritarian and corrupt government for a few more decades. The question is whether the students are the ones who arrogantly tell us something from the "Olympic heights" or whether they are historians-hobbyists and commentators in slippers.

The author is a lawyer