A protest movement led by the students in Serbia gathered more than 100,000 people for a huge event of a peaceful street on Saturday in the capital of Serbia, Belgrade, challenging the warnings of the leader of Strong Manbatted in the country that months of unrest were challenging the control of violence.
The event on Saturday, the greatest outburst of the public discontent in Serbia for decades, was preceded by a drum of warnings by President Aleksandar Vucic and its large media apparatus that the demonstrators were planning violent attacks to cause the “civil war” and seize power.
Opposition politicians added a presumptuous mood claiming to have received information from within the Serbia security service of secret plans to arrest the political rivals of Mr. Vucic.
But Saturday’s event, which began outside the Belgrade Parliament building and soon swallowed the city center, passed without important accidents. The supporters of President Vucic gathered in a park near Parliament and launched stones against students. But it fears that the government would deploy war veterans and football thugs linked to criminal gangs organized to beat the protesters – as in the past – has not materialized.
The Belgrade police said that the demonstrators numbered 107,000 while the students of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts of Belgrade University, who contributed to organizing the event, put the turnout to 800,000.
Speaking at the end of Saturday at a press conference, Vucic described the event as a “great protest with a huge negative energy towards the authorities”. He said 56 people were injured, nobody seriously, and praised his security services for having foiled what he said had been scheduled for violence.
His government, he added, “understood the message” of the demonstrators “and we will have to change ourselves”. While not giving any indication of what could be this change, he said that “citizens do not want color revolutions”, a term coined by the Kremlin to describe popular revolts in former Soviet territories such as Ukraine.
Apparently aware of how the former pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, sparked his fall in 2014 using the brute force against the protesters, Mr. Vucic has so far avoided breaking the students violently, although there have been some isolated attacks on them by his supporters.
As a question about a great protest, also on Saturday, in nearby Hungary against Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Vucic said that Hungarian and Serbian protests had “the same signature”, a reference to his statements insistent in the last few weeks according to which the West is orchestra by a campaign of disorders to bring down the populist leaders throughout the region.
The protests in Serbia, which spread throughout the country, reaching the cities that in the past have voted heavily for Mr. Vucic, started in November after 15 people were killed by the collapse of a concrete canopy in a newly renewed railway station. The students and politicians of the opposition – who dramatically protested last week, descending rockets and bombs of smoke in Parliament – they blamed the tragedy of poor works by contractors linked to corrupt officials.
While the students focused on a series of clear disaster requests, including the criminal proceeding against the managers and the dismissal of the ministers who supervised the renewal project, the political opponents of Vucic in Parliament have asked to form a “transition government” to supervise new elections.
The past elections, held under the supervision of the Serbian progressive party they govern, were ruined by the fraud of the voters and by the control of the government of the main television and news media, which allowed him to keep silent mainly the messaging of opposition candidates. Vucic said he was willing to keep an election but excluded a “transition government” that would include his opponents.
Since the protests collected momentum and attracted support well beyond the campus, which have been barricaded for months, have increasingly targeted Mr. Vucic, who has been in power for 13 years, with many demonstrators who now ask for his removal and even his imprisonment.
“Vucic arrest”, the demonstrators sang on Saturday. “He finished”, read the signs brought by some of them.
The political crisis in Serbia, where the son -in -law of President Trump, Jared Kushner, worked on a complicated agreement for a Luxury Hotel Trump in the center of the capital, places a dilemma for the new American administration.
Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the United States tried to woo Mr. Vucic away from the traditionally narrow partnership of Serbia with Russia and was criticized by opposition politicians to be too soft with Serbian President.
The Trump administration shows no sign of inclining from Mr. Vucic. Tuesday, Mr. Vucic met the president of the president, Donald Trump Jr., who was making a visit previously without notice to Belgrade. The Serbian president, encouraged by the dismantling of the Trump president of the Usaid aid agency, who had contributed to financing groups that documented electoral fraud and other abuses in Serbia, last month sent the armed police to raid the offices in Belgrade of non -governmental organizations that blamed for accused the discontent.