President of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić once again he showed that he doesn't understand anything anymore. What Milo Đukanović once said about Slobodan Milošević: he is a politician who has been overtaken by time. In any case, Sloba's successor is unable to understand how students function which he intended to do and that every colorful lie comes to an end.
His may not be yet, but what happened on Sunday, the day after the Vidovdan protest in Belgrade, smacks of the beginning of a revolt against dahia. The response to police brutality and mass arrests was not retreat, which Vučić was firmly counting on, but on the contrary - the fiercest blockade of Belgrade since the beginning of the student protest more than half a year ago. It may be a prelude to the radicalization of protests, to civil disobedience, for which the students in the blockade gave the "green light".
Gazela, Pančevački most, Autokomanda, Požeška na Banovo Brdo, Savska ulica, Miljakovac, Zemun were blocked on Sunday evening in Belgrade.
A metal fence was installed on the Gazelle.
Blockades were set up in Novi Sad, Niš, Zrenjanin...
Peak after peak
A new wave of protests the day after the Vidovdan protest in Belgrade, where around 140.000 people gathered, resulted in police beatings and mass arrests under obscure charges of attempting to overthrow the constitutional order.
Vučić himself challenged them with his address to the nation on Sunday at 11 am. He behaved, as usual, like someone who is furious that part of the citizens will not love him, admire him and listen to him. He told, as always, a series of lies and slanders against the students and announced that the police will beat and arrest from now on, he said that he will ask the prosecutor's office to file (contrived) indictments for the most serious crimes against the state, and the courts to put the accused in prison.
He expected that the students in the blockade and the rebellious citizens would recoil in fear, only the calculation turned out to be completely wrong.
Transition to open dictatorship
The mass blockades the day after the use of state force against the demonstrators, the number of people who showed up, seem to have surprised not only the top of the government, but also the Students in the blockade, only pleasantly. They showed a hitherto unknown level of solidarity in society, which represents the greatest danger for any authoritarian regime.
Instead of the Vidovdan rally being the peak of previous protests against the lawlessness of Vučić's government, it was actually the day after - a completely spontaneous, reflexive resistance to arrests and sometimes brutal police intervention.
When Vučić returns from Spain, where he traveled immediately after the address in which he boasted for the fourth time that he had defeated the "colored revolution", he will have to declare victory again.
The regime now has two possibilities: either, after Vučić's strong threats, he acts lenient again, so that the president appears ridiculous and frivolous in society, especially his own; or that he consistently implements new, repressive tactics, that the police intervene again against the blockaders and make arrests, so that a kind of European Lukashenko turns out.
It is feared that violence, once started, is difficult to get out of.
