The citizens of Serbia have woken up from their stupor.
In short, that would be a grade other blockages of Serbia due to disputed laws on referendum and expropriation on Saturday, December 4.
But it is not only about the laws that, according to the organizers, Rio Tinto needs to enable it to quickly and unhindered start exploiting Serbian lithium in the Jadra valley. And that's where Vučić/Brnabić/Pink/Informer & Co are right: On the streets, people also demonstrated their dissatisfaction with the populist government and the president Aleksandar Vučić, as they are.
The number of people who joined the protests was encouraging for the opposition in a broader sense, and worrying for the government. Citizens took to the streets in far greater numbers than last weekend, despite the veiled threats of the President and his men. Fear has dissipated, and that sets off all the alarms in an autocratic system.
The river of people that flowed through Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš, Kragujevac, Šabac... in about fifty locations, broke through the dam of the controlling media, the Lakrdija parliament, the police, and thugs with hoods on their heads. When it cannot be channeled through state institutions that have been turned into progressive fortresses, discontent spills out into the streets.
Some young people stepped onto the civil scene of Serbia without an iota of fear and with obvious organizational skills. Wherever there were provocations, the citizens did not back down in protest, but chased away the attackers. Left crochet in Šabac, who stopped the excavator that wanted to clear the human blockade, became a symbolic image of the two blockades of Serbia.
The atmosphere at the protests was such that one got the impression that the citizens would not have retreated even if the police cordons equipped to break up the demonstrations moved towards them. Probably because of this and because of the mass of the protest, the intervention of police and parapolice units and detachments was abandoned.
This leads to the absurdity of the government's claim that it was a handful of "terrorists" who, for Western money, want to violently bring the "thieves" Djilas to power - if they were terrorists, the state had to intervene, and if not, what does that say about the state ?
The Minister of Police Aleksandar Vulin this time gave up on demonstrating courage by having a close encounter with the protesters in front of the cameras.
The government turned on autopilot for all of that. On Pink TV, a special show with the usual guests called "Terror against the People" was broadcast all day. In parallel, recordings of "The President with the People" were played in the portal of the church in Gornji Nedeljice.
The "destinies of mercenaries" who "harassed millions of decent citizens" forced President Vučić to say on Saturday that the Law on Expropriation would be amended. A man whose power is based on intransigence has at least verbally announced that he will relent.
Which again leads to the absurdity of his claim that "as long as he is alive, the street will not determine the politics of Serbia", even though all of this is presented on Pink so that the President wants to meet the concerned locals from the Jadra valley with whom he spoke in the church. Vučić knows very well that any "giving in to the street" is a dangerous precedent.
But he had to buy time until the government got its act together because the response to the two Saturday blockades was unconvincing. It seems that the government's strategists have come to the conclusion that these protests will not just backfire like the previous ones.
A worrying precedent for the progressive government is that the national hero Novak Djokovic posted a photo on Twitter showing an endless column of people at Gazala, refuting the slogan of Vučić and his men that it was "dozens of protesters".
From the throne of the World Number One, he exposed the false claims and expressed sympathy for those who "terrorize the people". Maybe it wasn't exactly his fault, but it was the political effect of his tweet.
Djokovic's message with the photo "Clean air, water and food are the keys to health." Without that, every word about 'health' is redundant" has fallen into the background.
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