"The time of responsibility is coming, you can hear the tika-taka," mockingly says Darko Glišić in the morning TV Pink program, otherwise the Minister for Public Investments of the Government of Serbia and one of the most visible loyalists.
Those who follow football might think it is ruling party adopted Pep Guardiola's method from the period when he was ravaging Europe with Barcelona and when he established the "tika-taka" game system - constantly repeating passes and trying to keep the ball in your feet because that is the best way to prevent the opponent from scoring a goal. More simply, if you don't give him the ball, the opponent cannot create a chance, if there is no chance, there is no goal, if there is no goal, there is no victory...
Maybe that's where the thought came to Glišić. And he and his boss Vučić they love football and probably often watch and comment on football matches not only of Jedinstvo from Ub, Glišić's hometown, or Crvena zvezda, where Vučić is much more than a sponsor and fan, but also of the world's biggest clubs. It is quite certain that during these almost 14 years in power, they traveled around and watched matches in large stadiums, and it is possible that they introduced that very "tika-taka rule" into political life - if your opponent is never on TV, if he doesn't have a dinar, if he can't campaign, if he can't even form a team to oppose you - then he can't even beat you and you will perpetuate your power in elections as long as you live.
This approach was known from before, it was just formulated differently and the socialists liked to use it when they were in power. They used to say that their campaign motto was: "If the elections are organized properly, the people don't have to go to them."
However, times are changing, just like Bob Dylan, the American singer and poet, said in the early sixties, and these changes require a change in the way of playing, which the aforementioned Guardiola saw and long ago gave up the strict tick-tack system.
photo: zorica popović...
THREE-LEVEL TURNING
Maybe that, and maybe also the fact that those who are expected to support Vučić are changing, pushed the "veteran of Serbian politics" to embark on the latest campaign with his propaganda team in a slightly different way but with the same goal - the idea is to attract younger people, secure a new electorate because those who are standing on the fence of the rating - the population, which is on average over 60 years old, are slowly thinning out and leaving. For this purpose, new initiatives have been launched that are implemented on three levels - one is institutional, the second is on the Internet and the third is shyly going out on the street.
Although there is no indication whether there will be extraordinary parliamentary elections and whether they will be combined with the regular presidential elections that must be held by the spring of 2027, the government started at these levels and continued to do what people in politics usually do - they intensified the campaign with the aim of consolidating their voters and trying to attract the undecided to their side.
In this "tika-taka" approach, additional work is being done to kill the alternative, quarrel with all those who could be real opponents and reduce it - as before - to decorum to show and illustrate that in Serbia the people can legally and legitimately elect the government in elections recognized by the whole world.
Each of the mentioned components - institutional, digital and street - implies two basic ways of acting - establishing a superpower and trampling on anyone who could be "the other side" in any way. This can be seen when you look through the news of the last few months and, above all, face the changes that took place in the Serbian police. There it is no longer possible to grasp the currents that exist and understand who are whose people - are there still some who "overtook" Nebojša Stefanović, how many are there guarding Aleksandar Vulin, who is with Bratislava Gašić, is there anyone else in Ivica Dacić besides Vladan Zagrađanin and whether now, after all the shifts and changes, all those who make decisions in the police are loyalists of the order of Andrej Vučić.
After six years of the "Jovanjica" affair, in which the then leading members of the Criminal Police in charge of the fight against narcotics "died", hints arrived last week that those who succeeded them in that position could also "fly" from the police after the seizure of five tons of marijuana in the village of Konjuh near Kruševac. This is just an illustration of the institutional campaign that is being conducted after the appointment of the notorious Marko Kričko to the key position of head of the Criminal Police. To simplify - even those appointed by the regime after Jovanjica are not reliable enough, the system needs to be "weighted down" and others who literally will not do anything that was not personally approved by the "loyalist" boss.
In this, it seems, the final phase of the regime, it is necessary that there is not even the smallest crack in the chain of decision-making and distorted application of the law. That is why, after the police, we move on, to the "weighing" of the judiciary and the prosecution, apparently everything according to the law and norms. The regime got so lost in its attempt to establish total control that some escaped, some he himself took into position and gave them the ability to enforce the law.
That is why it is now necessary to cut off the heads that stick out the most, and that is a campaign within the institutions. The message that this campaign carries is simple - whoever does not listen to the "top of the state" cannot be part of the state apparatus and, if necessary, all laws and rules will be changed to achieve such an order. This part of the campaign does not refer to the process of consolidating voters, but to the process of removing obstacles and preventing future actions of institutions that could, if they did not understand the messages, declare someone else instead of the regime as the winner of the election or cancel h if they are not regular.
Vučić needs to fully secure himself from that side, because for some reason he believes that "partners from the world" - the European Union and the USA - will accept everything that happens in future elections if it has the seal of official institutions. His looking over the fence, which is becoming more and more eloquent, gives some hope that he has not completely gone "to the other side" and that he wants to create the illusion that Serbia is not Belarus after all, and he is Lukashenka.
That campaign also has its branches towards the world that cares about the electoral system. Vučić does not show any new ideas on that part of the field. On the contrary, he believes that he could get away with tricks once again only with criticism of the work of the European Parliament and some non-governmental organizations, and that the major European countries and the European Commission itself would continue to see him as a legitimate representative of Serbia despite all the undemocratic actions he uses to color his actions.
Now it's the turn of the police, the judiciary, the state administration, and after that comes the "fixing" of the university and other parts of the educational system, because they want to blunt the edge of the student rebellion, which has now gone beyond the boundaries of individual faculty buildings. Vučić intends to subjugate the universities in order to nip in the bud any possibility of rebellion since he did not quite understand that the rebellion has spread throughout Serbia and that the fact that there are no faculty blockades does not mean that the protest is over. Nevertheless, as in the police and judiciary, targets have been identified, the heads that stick out have been listed and work is being done every day to smear them when it is already difficult to remove them institutionally or physically.
photo: ognjen stevanović / fonetVUČIĆ'S TRUSTS: Robotization of voters...
AN INFLUENCER'S AFTERNOON
When the boss gets tired of framing and the reputations that bring him about who said what where, who he met, whose godfather he is or who owes whom money - that's why Vučić is like well-informed journalists - and when he gets tired of TV stations where he repeats the same story and answers the same questions every God's day, he moves to the internet and there he pushes his non-stop campaign, conducts his non-stop internet tour. Approximately, like Bob Dylan who has been playing around the world for 40 years on the "Neverending tour".
For years now, Vučić has been acting as an influencer on Instagram, which should serve as a hub for gathering new voters. However, those appearances backfired on him, becoming a source for standard TV announcements when the cameras of Pink, Informer and Tanjug are not with him.
Basically, Instagram is that Vučić is irredeemably not charming, witty, inspiring and that he and his stories cannot be made into good content on a network where only beautiful and good things are shown. Unless it was his idea to make some money based on the number of views, it is hard to believe that the stories about Haribo candies, the bullying of Siniša Mali or the showing of an apartment in a village near Davos brought any soul to the list of voters.
Moreover, no one heard someone praised what they saw on those Instagram posts of the President of Serbia, and little of the news that appeared there was remembered. Vučić's communications advisers are now preparing speeches for him to give in a certain place during the street campaign and then broadcast it live on all the regime's televisions, and chop up parts of those speeches and put them on Instagram. These are usually those nationalist messages: "I love Serbia the most", "I defend Serbia alone", "Don't worry people, we have a strong army"... There is no expert who would prove that Vučić was not just throwing money at these things.
Obviously, they became aware of this in his team as well. As they measure how much his support is melting and realize that there are no new voters unless they are directly bought, someone shrewdly estimated that it is time to switch to "Tik Tok". Based on available data, TikTok today has nearly two billion users worldwide, with around 735 million unique monthly visits, with a significant portion of the audience being users aged 25 to 34, while most of the creators are younger – between 18 and 24. Slightly more than half of the users are men, and the most time on this platform, on average per user, is spent in Finland.
From this, it is easy to establish who is Vučić's target group to whom he "addressed" on "Tik-Tok" and what was the first news on all the televisions he controls then and in the following days.
And indeed, he attracted considerable attention with his "live". There are many testimonies that the children knew about his performance, but the most interesting for them was the "guest appearance" of Baka Praset - the most famous and richest Serbian influencer, banned on most networks and platforms.
photo: zorica popović…and regime thugs
I'M TAKING A VIDEO
Two days after Vučić's incarnation on Tik Tok, the public realized that Baka Prase - until some time ago under the attack of the secret service - had moved from a "subject to measures" to a useful collaborator. Namely, Baka Prase soon had his own show on the Kick network on Sunday, and his event was watched live by over 600 thousand people at one point, which is an unattainable dream even for Vučić. That "event" (quasi amateur boxing tournament) completely nullified the story that Vučić tried to establish on Tik Tok. His engagement thus lasted as long as one reel-to-reel footage - less than a day. And whether he attracted someone to his side - is a big big question.
Baka Prase, on the other hand, returned like a convalescent to the big media, since it turned out that the event in itself was that Vučić was talking to the biggest influencer. It probably helped his event on the only network where he can "appear" get incredible coverage and make him rich.
While Vučić was "filming himself for the video" (a phrase from a verse by Voodoo Popeye), his loyalists took to the field. As they say - among the people on the streets, markets and squares in order to see, as someone put it, "how much the people hate them". What they avoided for a year, the progressives tried last weekend, and it seems that the action did not go very well despite Sinisa Mali's brave announcements from the stand near the Wolf Monument in Belgrade, even though he has been living in Dedinje for years.
HOW TO LOOK STUPID
A month after the spectacular student action in more than 100 cities and municipalities in which almost 400 citizens' signatures were collected, loyalists went to some places to do what is the normal and usual work of political "subjects" - live communication with the people, voters and potential voters. How the action itself took place was seen in the reports of the controlled media - it was almost not even mentioned and obviously there is still not what Vučić would like - that even on the street the people like the content on Tik Tok and follow what the TV tells them every day on the televisions.
This time, there were no police assessments like in those gatherings of progressives a few months ago when it was said that hundreds of thousands of people had gathered in one day and that it was over with the blockaders. The street "didn't show" and it seems that the next appearance will be planned much more carefully. For now, Vučić announced a rally for the second half of March in Belgrade - it remains to be seen how the preparations are going and whether there will be any gatherings at all.
During that time, a strange post-holiday and post-protest atmosphere flooded Serbia, which does not contribute to changes. After months in which the protests were of high intensity, it was as if "the tone fell" and it was as if the anger produced by the idea that change is impossible also set in. What spilled onto the streets and into the real world in 2025 has now returned to the internet. And there, those who were not born with him, manage like Vučić. They would like a lot, but they turn out to be either funny or "stupid in society" because they fail to the greatest extent to jump beyond botting or repeating fake news. It will be said that the authenticity of the actions during the protest cannot be seen in the posts on the Internet - "there" every "struggle" is just another line of spitting, insults and almost hate speech, which is what social networks are for anyway.
The student rebellion that flooded and raised Serbia last year forced the regime to further cocoon itself, put pressure on everyone in the country, threaten even greater violence and push Serbia, if it deems it necessary, into open civil conflicts. The regime tried to respond to the students with their actions, but it was clear that in that field they could only copy what they had already done.
That's why the government is making it harder now because it probably hopes that this year the student movement could disappear and that the regime will face its old acquaintances and clients from the opposition in the elections. Whether this will happen will also depend on the approach of the traditional opposition and their understanding of the moment and what lies ahead, in the fall or at the latest in the spring of the following year. If the unsuccessful completion of work on the EXPO project does not blow everything up long before then.
