While this text is being printed, amendments to several laws in the field of justice will be voted on in the National Assembly. Their purpose is to stop the few judges and prosecutors who in the previous year took heart and started or continued to work according to the law and not according to dictates. The regime, through its deputy Uglješa Mrdić, is implementing the idea of Aleksandar Vučić - to loyalize all parts and all institutions so that no one would think of prosecuting those who "lead the state".
More than a year after the beginning of the student protests that marked the year 2025 and that began as a cry for the implementation of the law in the case of the fall of the canopy in Novi Sad and the suffering of 16 people, the response of the regime arrives. It reads: justice will not be carried out as the people demanded, but an institutional purge will be organized against all those who did not obey the orders of the top of the regime.
The mechanism is observable, observed and documented. In short - it is necessary to implement personnel changes at all levels and bodies, especially where decisions are made in the work of the judiciary and the prosecution in order to ensure obedience in the months ahead. This means that it must not happen by chance that those from the government are prosecuted for whom direct approval was not given from the top of the regime. For example, it can be the former mayor of Niš, Dragana Sotirovski - she has been in custody for almost a year and no one from the ruling party shed a tear for her, nor did they mention her even in one guest appearance in the morning programs. It turns out that Dragana Sotirovski never existed, nor did she have anything to do with the regime.
GRAND FINALE
Many people were surprised when they saw a certain Uglješa Mrdić as a proposer of laws in the field of the electoral system. They laughed even more when they saw his counter-hunger strike in early November in front of the House of National Assembly building, right next to an unsanitary paramilitary camp. His task was to counter the hunger strike of Dijana Hrka, the mother of the injured boy under the canopy in Novi Sad. Now everyone is dumbfounded when they see and listen to him explain in the assembly the reasons for the changes in the law in the field of justice.
He proved to be a loyal and hard-working follower of Aleksandar Vučić's policy - ready to starve a little in order to "prove a point". And it was that the prosecutor for organized crime did not want to act on his criminal report, which related to those responsible for the fall of the canopy. Mrdić's criminal complaint stemmed from the "journalistic investigative work" of Dragan J. Vučićević. He was the first to "discover and disclose" the conspiracy last summer, and then his "findings" about the corrupt prosecutor Mladen Nenadić - the first prosecutor of the Prosecutor's Office for organized crime - were exploited in the media for several months by all those from the regime who appeared daily on televisions controlled by the regime and Telekom Srbija.
The grand finale is these days - a little in the Parliament, and more on TV screens. It is about the public vilification of Mladen Nenadić, Zagorka Dolovac and Branko Stamenković - all three are prominent representatives of the prosecution system - along with Mrdić's extensive presentation of their "sins and crimes".
"EVERYTHING ACCORDING TO THE LAW"
Sometimes it seems that Mrdić would sing with the fiddle just to explain to the people how these three people caused his anger and desire for revenge, in which he is wholeheartedly assisted by Nenad Vujić, the current Minister of Justice. He should be the "writer of the explanation" for the judgments pronounced by Uglješa Mrdić. The truth according to Mrdić and Vujić is the following: the renegade prosecutors are hiding the real truth about the responsibility for the fall of the canopy and the death of the sixteen, and they are doing so because they are part of a conspiracy group led by the rector of Belgrade University Vladan Đokić, who is wholeheartedly assisted by "foreign power centers" - especially Germany, which was seen last week when Zagorka Dolovac had a meeting with the German ambassador in Belgrade, Anke Konrad.
Even worse, at the end of last year, she went abroad alone with Stamenković, to a meeting where international crime was discussed, without asking anyone and reporting about it. That is why, with the new proposals of the law, Mrdić focused on regulating the area so that the prosecutor cannot go anywhere without the approval of the minister. Even when he gets the approval, he has to be accompanied by a ministry official, so let's see how he will deceive and betray the state, which is the assumption of the "legislator".
Further - the aforementioned Stamenković, presumably in cooperation with Zagorka Dolovac, brought Aleksandar Vučić to a public scandal because in the elections for members of the High Council of Prosecutions in December 2025, the current that did not listen to Vučić won. Those were the first elections within a state institution that the president of Serbia lost. As he did not come to terms with that, the composition of the Constitutional Court was quickly changed. Namely, those who lost in the elections submitted a report to this institution and it annulled the elections in four places in record time. This is how new elections for the High Council of Prosecutors are held, with the expectation that now Vučić's loyalists within the prosecutor's office will win. "Everything according to the law", as the poet Đorđe Balašević says in the traditional Don't break my dredging.
Stamenković has "one more flaw" according to this narrative, which comes from Mrdić and the top of the regime: he came from the department for High-Tech Crime - an institution that deals with threats and attacks that occur in the Internet area. Now it has been estimated that that department needs to be placed under the full control of the Belgrade Higher Prosecutor's Office, which is managed by Nenad Stefanović, a proven loyalist in the prosecutor's office, ready to do everything he is ordered to do "from the top". And all this so that in the continuation of the fight against the "internal enemy" and the repeatedly defeated "colored revolution", all those who write badly about Vučić and the regime on social networks would be even more effectively monitored, arrested and punished. Although that department within the prosecution system was very up-to-date whenever someone threatened Vučić, it was judged that this was not enough and that it should be more active in suppressing "hostile activity on social networks". Namely, Vučić repeated several times: "I can appear on TV once a day, but they leave thousands of negative comments and posts. And who can deal with that and how is it possible to answer all those lies..."
That's why Mrdić stepped in on January 20 in the TV Pink morning program: "Then Zdravko Ponoš won't be allowed to talk about the sound cannon without being prosecuted."
EUROPE IS FAR
We come to the third person who needs to be "eliminated". It is formally the most difficult because the EU said that Serbia needs an even stronger and more efficient TOK, and that is Mladen Nenadić, who, although the progressives put him in office, turned out to be insufficiently loyal to the top of the regime. There has been a slander campaign against him for months, especially intensified due to the accusation of two former and one active minister - Tomislav Momirović and Goran Vesić for corruption in the construction of the railroad, and Nikola Selaković for the "General Staff" case. Obviously, it has been assessed that the trial must not even take place and that the mentioned associates of Vučić do not think of defending themselves in court and proving their innocence, but work is being done to cancel the case by shutting down the prosecution or putting it in a position to give up the proceedings. This fine and nuanced game is played on several levels with a distinct desire not to anger anyone outside of Serbia, so a strategy that Donald Trump calls the "art of the deal" is applied. It is a method of someone who is much more powerful to get something by giving it to him so as not to cause a much bigger upheaval.
To put it more simply: Vučić attacked everyone, he raised enormous attention, he directed everything he intended to do through Mrdić and the like, and the goal is to show that there will be no trial of his associates unless he orders and approves it, as in the case of Dragana Sotirovski. He attacked the entire judiciary - if he succeeds in crippling the TOK with amendments or self-censoring it with this performance, he has achieved what he needed now. He applies that method in order not to get "fingers crossed" by "partners from the EU" who follow these processes. Everything is clear to them, but apparently they have no desire to dig too deep and enter the "small intestines" since it has nothing to do with their strategic policies.
SHOOTING FROM ALL WEAPONS
Although everyone knows that everything that is happening now is eons away from any reform that should increase the capacity of the judiciary and the prosecution to make Serbia a state based on the rule of law and to enable access to justice for everyone in an equal way, the results of the judiciary and the prosecution over the past 25 years are not significant enough for many people to shed a tear for them. That's why it's easy for Minister Vujic to draw numbers and show that this kind of TOK has not achieved any great results in its 20 and more years of existence, when it is taken into account that there were no major adjudicated cases in relation to the proceedings it led, and that the proceedings lasted endlessly and so on. Aside from the fact that Vujić himself has been a part of that system since the beginning, the responsibility for such results partly goes to his account.
Last year, it appeared that some parts of the prosecution and judiciary might wake up just as the students demanded at the beginning of their rebellion. It seemed as if a popular revolt, sparked by student actions, had rounded up those in the justice system who had taken heart and institutionally stepped forward. It goes without saying that the regime is not sitting idly by and now wants to eliminate all those who "raised their heads" in a "legal way", but also to prevent progressive bigwigs from appearing before the court. Also to remove any possibility that tomorrow a new investigation will be launched against loyalists or those who are close to them in business.
The regime "shoots with all weapons", people in the judiciary are still kept reserved. If they want the support of citizens, they will have to appear publicly and be seen and known by people. Ultimately, this is an attack by those who want the rule of the stronger, not the rule of law.
