The break-down of the representative system and the road to dictatorship

(on the example of Serbia)

The current political crisis in Serbia is probably, by the sheer mass of people involved and determination to pursue the struggle, one of the most remarkable events in Serbia’s political history. However, looked from the point of view of governance it is a simple repeat of the problems that have plagued Serbia’s politics since it re-emerged as an independent Principality, and then Kingdom in the first half of the 19^th century. Serbia is, like Argentina and Russia, to use the expression coined by V. S. Naipaul, a country with circular history: the same events with different personalities re-occur permanently, and seemingly forever. (I wrote about the circular history of Russia here.) In fact, Serbia was ruled in 1835 and in 1925 in the exactly the same manner as today: an authoritarian leader using quasi democratic or consultative tools is presiding over a clientelistic system which propagates corruption at all levels as a way to ensure sufficient political support. Two elements are key: authoritarian rule and widespread graft.

Against that particular background, the current student-led protest appears, by its demand for judiciary responsibility of those guilty of mass corruption and shoddy public works that have led to the death of 15 people in November, to be entirely right. And indeed as a spontaneous movement that began among the university youth, it was. But once the protest had become more massive, bringing in large segments of the urban bourgeoisie and even some farmers and trade unions, the problems have emerged.

The movement realized early on that it could be successful only if was entirely apolitical, i.e. with no links to any political group or party and outside the representative system. However disliked the Vučić regime is among many people, it still wins either majority or plurality in all elections: Vučić won the largely free 2022 presidential election by 61 percent against 18 percent for his closest rival, and his party won 48 percent of the popular vote in the 2023 parliamentary elections. The opposition parties are fragmented by ideology and incessant leadership fights. There is thus a strong dislike, or even hatred, of the current regime, but that dislike cannot be politically expressed because the opposition parties are almost equally disliked. The reasons for their irrelevance are many but one should not ignore that when, in their earlier incarnations, they were in power they ran more or less the same clientelistic system and suffered from corruption. Vučić’s regime simply exacerbated these flaws. In short, the multi-party system breaks down, and at least 40 percent of the population has nobody to represent them (the turnout in the past two elections was under 60 percent).

The student-led movement decided thus to play the game of anti-politics. It banned any political parties’ flags or insignias, or the use of foreign flags (targeting the EU flag which is widely unpopular in Serbia) and eschewed any formal organization. The movement has brought the school system to a halt for the past three months, students have occupied universities, high-school kids have gone on long marches throughout the country to spread their message, and the decisions what to do next are made, it is claimed, by students’ “plenums” and by direct vote (although nobody seems to know how this vote takes place nor whether it is unanimous or not). The movement (which even lacks a name) communicates by issuing statements or pronunciamentos that appear to issue from up-high, from the Olympian heights and that moreover go unsigned. Its intellectual supporters have advanced the idea of popular (direct) democracy unencumbered by political parties. The anti-political aspect of the movement has been praised by philosophers and pundits like Slavoj Žižek and Yannis Varoufakis.

But while working outside of the political is the reason for the movement’s success, it has a fundamentally destabilizing effect when translated into real politics. With the current amorphous mass that even lacks a visible leadership the movements has no tools to engage the governments and Vučić himself. The movement, in the secrecy in which it operates, resembles more the Khmer Rouge than the Polish Solidarnosc. Solidarnosc created immediately the structures of leadership and engaged the negotiations with the government.

The decision not to move into the political and not to transform itself into a formal organization or a political party is both the blessing and the curse. It is a blessing because only thus can the movement go on; it is a curse because it can never formulate its demands in an understandable political language and improve or change the political system. For the latter, it needs to descend from its Olympian heights, transform itself into a hierarchical organization with the known leadership (no single leader has emerged in almost four months!), convert its current language into a political idiom, and expect, or hope, to politically represent large segments of the disaffected population. But once it does that, it descends to the level of political parties, which, as already noted, are widely distrusted. Further, as the movement moves into the world of politics, the fact that within itself it contains all kinds of supporters, from the extreme nationalist right to the Greens, social-democrats, and pro-European liberals will become manifest and such a heterogenous coalition will be unmanageable and would quickly dissipate.

The movement thus must continue playing the same game with no end in sight. That situation will at some point become unsustainable and the Vučić regime will have to become more repressive and move towards an open dictatorship. This is exactly what happened in 1929 when King Alexander I banned all political activity and imposed personal dictatorship. The broad-based apolitical movement ultimately leads to two outcomes: dictatorship or chaos. As chaos cannot last, it produces dictatorship in any case. In the longer-term, some of the movement’s good sides will probably remain (in the way that the 1968 student movements transformed social mores), but in the short- to medium-term its political results will be the exact opposite of what it hopes to achieve.

(The picture from Politico.eu)