Belgrade calling

Protests in Serbia

Feb 9th 2011, 15:12 by T.J.
THE next general election in Serbia should be over a year off, but campaigning has already begun—and with a bang. On Sunday [thanks: drkdv in comments] Saturday the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) held the biggest opposition rally in Belgrade since the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000. The party's leader, Tomislav Nikolić, demanded that a general election be called by April 5th, and threatened more protests if he did not get his way.

The government shrugged this off, but the public’s discontent is clear. Teachers and police have been on strike; health workers may soon join them. The economy is nominally recovering, but few people feel it. Unemployment stands at 19%. And the ruling coalition has been quarrelling in public. Tensions are evident within the biggest party, President Boris Tadić’s Democrats. The government has lost authority, admits Mlađan Dinkić, the deputy prime minister. Big changes are needed, he says, to avert a serious electoral defeat.
The SNS may know what it is opposed to, but it is less clear what is for. The party was formed in 2008 by unhappy members of the extreme nationalist Radical Party, whose leader is on trial in The Hague for war crimes. It professes to be pro-European. Mr Nikolić has even said, grudgingly, that he would arrest Ratko Mladić, a fugitive general who is wanted by the war-crimes tribunal.
One official retorts tartly that saying you are pro-European costs nothing. When the SNS's deputies were asked to put their votes where their mouth is, during debate on a parliamentary resolution to condemn the 1995 Srebrenica massacre by soldiers commanded by Mr Mladić, they balked.
One senior SNS official argues that the Belgrade protests have broken the optimistic picture of Serbia presented by the government to the outside world. He notes, too, that the SNS has a hard time getting a fair hearing in the media.
That the SNS is popular, and that most Serbs are unhappy with their lot, is hardly news, says Marko Blagojevic, a Serbian pollster. Recent events, especially splits in the government, make it hard to predict when an election might be held. But he doubts if SNS supporters have the stamina to keep up weeks of protests. He also says that, if there were an election now, the government that emerged would look much the same as the current one. Why? Because, unlike the Democrats, the SNS has few potential coalition partners. Others are less sure, suggesting instead that the two parties could go into (awkward) coalition together.

the economist

http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2011/02/protests_serbia