We need to talk about pensioners. While the regime is closing day by day the chasms that are opening everywhere even where there are no students, and as the warm days come there can only be more of them, let's remember that every fifth resident of the Republic of Serbia is over 65 years old. When, on December 28 last year, Students in Blockade in cooperation with the network of choirs collected almost 400.000 signatures of support from citizens in just one day, demonstrating the power and national support that has rarely been seen by any political movement in Serbia, many witnesses pointed out how a large number of senior citizens, pensioners, came to the stands and signed.
Is it really the case that pensioners have changed sides? There are no publicly available statistics to support this. On the contrary, all studies on student support point to the opposite conclusion - that those over 65 are the strongest supporters of the regime. But that is exactly why this question is so important. Namely, Serbia is too old to ignore the attitude of pensioners. Often, in some sad narrative about the demographics of the future, you will hear how it is an economic, environmental, security challenge. It may be a little boring to look at those numbers, but the aging population is clearly a first-rate political issue. And not just any kind. Along with untruths, police brutality, the destruction of the legal system with pardons and bizarre projects like Mrdić's laws, along with all the daily circus in the crisis in which we found ourselves with an illegitimate government that refuses to call elections, Serbia's demography is one of the strongest weapons the regime has at its disposal.
Because where two or three are gathered, no matter what the Gospel says (Matthew 18:20), if they happen to be pensioners, among them is not Christ but Aleksandar Vučić. Namely, if you see three pensioners who met by chance, research from 2025 tells us that at least two unreservedly support the illegitimate regime. We cannot rely too much on research, but we can note that all of them, from CRTE to FPN, see support for the regime in the oldest population, which is always stable and extremely high - around 63 percent. There are no published analyzes that say otherwise.
"This is excellent. Vučić is now standing still and everything must be working properly," says one pensioner, a gentleman over 75 years old, while curiously observing the stand where students are talking to citizens. However, when invited to approach, he wavers. "No, no", he resists as if he will catch some kind of disease at the student stand. The conversation reveals that although, unlike many followers of the regime, he thinks that the current pressure makes the government more efficient and fair, he unreservedly supports the regime. Inevitably, the question arises as to why this is so. "When the students win, they will cancel the pension," he says quite seriously. It is futile to convince him otherwise. "Oh, I know how it goes", he says, "if the students come to power, they will say 'this guy stole everything'. And it won't be for pensions".
Although pensioners like him feel protected, Serbia does not actually have a gerontocratic system. In contrast, most of the planet is currently ruled by the peers of the anxious retiree. Some world leaders are very old people - if you look at the average age of the current presidents of the great powers, it is not significantly different from the geriatrics who ruled the Soviet Union during the time of Brezhnev, the Spartan old men and the Venetian half-dead doges, because of which these empires once lost their economic, technological and life initiative.
Such gerontocratic systems usually fall not because of bad or ill-considered decisions, but because of the absence of any decision when crises occur. However, this has certainly not been the case with Serbia since the beginning of the student protests. Decisions are made every day and you don't know which one is worse than which. History has also known extremely old leaders such as Mugabe and Bouteflika, who were kept alive almost like zombies by the clique in power just to prevent change. However, a gerontocracy of that type is not in power in Serbia, but it is not unreasonable to conclude that the government is being governed in the name of geriatrics. Or, using her.
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STATE OF THE ELDERLY
Serbia is dying. The number of inhabitants has been decreasing since the beginning of the nineties - despite the influx of refugees from other parts of the former Yugoslavia, it decreased to 7,5 million in 2001, before falling to 7,2 million in 2011. This year, Serbia dropped to just 6,7 million inhabitants, revealing its increasingly aging face. At this moment, as in the well-known media comparison, due to the demographic difference between live births and deaths, one city in Serbia really disappears in a year. Hints of this three-decade-long demographic crisis are now quite clearly seen both in statistics and in labor shortages, lifestyles and values. If you thought before that this is something that only affects right-wing organizations and all those "family" movements, that is, that it is not important for your daily life, you are mistaken. It is a political issue. Societies are functional communities that can make life difficult for their members just because they fall into such statistical spirals.
This gray data actually reveals an irreversible process leading to further decline in growth. Since fewer children are born, Serbia is becoming an increasingly aging society, which brings with it an abundance of economic problems, such as the growing "natural" burden on the pension system and the lack of vital labor, but also political and cultural challenges. RZS data indicate a decrease in the share of the working-age population (15-64) in the total population, from 67,3 percent (2002) to 64,4 percent (2021). In the same interval, the average age of the population increased from 40,2 to 43,5 years. The process of demographic aging of the population means that the participation of young people is low and the share of the elderly in the total population is continuously growing.
The imbalance between the youngest and the oldest has already entered an unpleasant phase - in 2021, the share of people aged 65 and over was 21,3 percent, and those under 15 years old only 14,3 percent. According to United Nations data, in 1950 the share of people over the age of 65 in Serbia was only 6% of the population, but with the gradual extension of life and the aging of the population, it rose to 9% by 1971, to 12% in 1991, and at the beginning of the 21st century, it reached 14% and for the first time became greater than the number of children under 18. Today, according to the data of the Republic Institute of Statistics, as many as 22,3% of the population is over 65 years old, which is about 1,5 million people and is still growing.
TOOLS OF AUTHORITY
Unfortunately, there is reason to believe that this is where the heart of support for the regime is located, which, despite enormous pressure, tens of thousands of protests and the most massive actions in Serbia's recent history, remained in power and did not even call for elections. The party in power does not have an official ideology like any populist movement, but it is clearly aware of where its key human capital of nearly a million people lies. They measured it a long time ago and are watching carefully. The spring and then the September survey published by CRTA confirmed several years of projections that older citizens of Serbia are the core of support for the ruling party. There is nothing strange in the fact that the older part of the population massively supports the conservative party, while the younger part is more revolutionary.
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However, it is indeed a rare case that in one society the working population has a drastically different attitude from the pensioners. Actually, quite the opposite. And while two out of three pensioners support the regime, among people aged 30 to 65 two out of three support students (see box – compare the almost identical, just opposite, ratio of red and blue bars in the graph). If we go further into demographics, these measurements showed that there is almost no difference in support between urban and rural areas (barely a 5 percent difference), while the imbalance can be seen in educational profiles, but if we cross them with the educational distribution by age, we come back to the conclusion that the division is exclusively between - old and young.
The ruling party's strategy has been to work on pensioners for years, and now it has openly invited them to be the core of support. That core is massive because the age of the population is high, and the regime no longer tries to communicate this through media finesse aimed at "grandparents", but openly closes the ranks of the oldest. Look at the stands that SNS brings to the streets - they offer trips to the spa, medical check-ups, firewood and winter shelter. Serbia is in a literal war of generations. One very massive one that clings firmly to the ruling party. And the rest, the younger population that is trying to fight for freedom.
So let's imagine something else. If tomorrow there were elections in Serbia where our oldest fellow citizens, for some reason, would all give up voting (including the third who actively protest and support students), purely mathematically, the opponents of the regime, if they are now students, would become not only stronger (which is the case now), but literally twice as strong as the regime. There would be no way for them to be defeated in the elections and they would have absolute power and a two-thirds majority in parliament. Now it could be said, according to various findings, that about 64% of the population wants elections (that number is higher than the support for students and includes a part of those who support the regime), and then almost 100% would want it.
Such an upper age limit is, of course, impossible. It would not only be unconstitutional, but also unnatural because the most experienced parts of the community cannot be excluded from decision-making and the life of society. However, the politics of almost all anti-regime movements in Serbia have always behaved as in this thought experiment - as if it were a part of society that does not vote. On the other hand, the regime that lost the battle for the youth has now positioned itself as if only this part of society votes.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOOMERS
The idea that pensioners are corrupted by their promises is unfounded. After all, as in all age groups, there are also older people, a minority that is steeped in corruption, is directly involved in regime combinations and party affairs, usually the most miserable ones, to attend rallies for small money and sandwiches. However, the absolute majority of pensioners do not participate in these fraudulent activities, but think that the regime is a better choice for the future.
Why? How can you even explain why a leader without charm, a clumsy and unpleasant man, who screams hysterically, eats squid and is jealous of his own brother, enjoys such strong sympathy from the most experienced part of the population? How can people with so much life experience believe such obvious lies?
People over 65 are the transition zone between conservative boomers and Generation X. They were Tito's children, pioneers, but in the eighties they listened to Yugoslav rock and wore the first jeans. They were at the beginning of their careers in the 1990s, and it can roughly be said that they did not support Slobodan Milošević's wartime regime as massively as their parents' generation. Some were also active in the protests of that time. Their careers were destroyed by the collapse of Yugoslavia and sanctions, many of them were in the war and then suffered transitional injustice. Now they are the last believers of Aleksandar Vučić. At first glance, nothing predisposes them to be so.
It is natural to expect that senior citizens want stability - good for themselves, their families, their country, and for some reason this generation thinks that one man who tells lies every day can give them that. The irony is that they are doing the most harm to themselves, making the gap between rising wages and pensions bigger and bigger, that healthcare, which has been adapted to the private sector, is less and less available for them, that their children are leaving, that life is too expensive and that the system is corrupting them themselves, turning against families, children, putting them in situations where they say that students should be killed. And to stop watching their favorite tennis player.
The answer to the question requires extensive sociological analysis and would probably range from anxiety to needing someone to protect them. But the answer is perhaps self-evident even without that – it's a generation waiting for attention. One should beware of generalizations, but this is the thing that perhaps best characterizes our oldest generation today. If we try to place them in a very rough, broadest generational context, we see that their grandfathers built Yugoslavia, their fathers destroyed it in blood, and the children began to build democracy in the new century, while now the grandchildren are trying to finally liberate it. And them? No one paid attention to them. Except him.
