When tens of thousands of demonstrators blocked three key bridges through the Danube river, paralyzing the second largest city in Serbia this weekend, the government party besieged by the Balkan country.
After ignoring mainly three months of street events led by students across the country, Serbia radio television, for a long time a bull of propaganda for President Aleksandar Vucic, had suddenly moved march and put protests in Novi Sad at the top of his news .
Worse still, at least for the government party, has actually reported without denouncing the protesters as traitors in the remuneration of foreign intelligence services or opposition puppets, as in the past.
The Serbian Progressive Party of President Vucic complained in an unusual declaration at the end of Saturday regarding the “scandalous reports” by the broadcaster, stating that “he seriously abused the journalistic profession, siding with politicians who would have destroyed the constitutional order of the Republic of Serbia “.
The media control was a central pillar of the Serbia system under Mr. Vucic, allowing him to resist several rounds of protests by demonizing and discrediting the protesters and maintaining a stopped grip for more than 12 years.
Many, however, are now asking if this control is sliding and with it perhaps the increasingly authoritarian domain of the president.
“This is a small but perhaps revolutionary change,” said Jasmina Paunovic, a veteran state prosecutor in Belgrade, the capital. He added that the longtime lealists were faltering throughout the system while “they shake off their fear” of losing their state works or dealing with disciplinary actions.
He said that many judges and public ministries he knows, even if in the end they depend on the state for their career, now support students, at least in private. The Association of Lawyers of Serbia voted on Sunday for lawyers to suspend the work for a month in solidarity with the students, who have barricaded Campus across the country.
The weekend protests in Novi Sad were held three months after a structural bankruptcy in a recently renewed railway station of the city killed 15 people, attracted not only students of local universities and Belgrade, but also crazy of elderly angry for that who see as a system full of corruption.
The collapse of 1 November of a concrete canopy suspended on the entrances of the station crushed people under it and triggered the snowball protest movement, which was guided by the belief that official negligence and graft were responsible for the tragedy . The station was renewed by a consortium of Chinese state -owned companies and the work on the canopy was carried out by a private private contractor who had been promoted by officials.
Recent protests for several weekends represent the greatest explosion of discontent from street events in the late 90s against Slobodan Milosevic, nationalist leader of Serbia during the Balkan wars that followed the collapse of the communist Yugoslavia.
Svetlana Bistrovic, 43 years old, a nurse and mother of two children, said he had decided to cheer for students who block a great railway bridge and road in Novi Sad on Saturday after seeing the Star of Serbian tennis Novak Djokovic appearing on Friday evening With a basketball game with a shirt with the words “Students are champions”.
He waved a sign decorated with protest slogans and with a plastic tennis racket.
The fact that Mr. Djokovic, whose family has been frankly in the support of President Vucic, sided with the demonstrators, he said, he showed that “the change is coming to this country”.
But Mr. Vucic shows no sign of giving up. Last week he threw his prime minister away, Milos Vucevic, a loyal ally, a former mayor of Novi Sad and president of the government party, known as SNS, leaving the country without government.
But Mr. Vucic, confident that his party may defeat fracturi opposition parties in any new election, given the irregular electoral game field, has since promised to go offensive against his political opponents and to call a general election if Parliament is unable to approve a new government at will.
“I will not give anyone this state on a dish,” he told supporters on Saturday. “I will fight, I will fight, I will fight.”
Nebojsa Vladisavljevic, professor of political science at the University of Belgrade, described Serbia as a “spin dictatorship”, which, like other post-communist governments in nearby Hungary and elsewhere, “is less repressive but much more manipulative”.
He said that the sudden change in messaging by the state broadcaster, RTS “is only a part of a game to demonstrate that there is a little media coverage”.
And even without television and state radio firmly on the side of the president, he added, Mr. Vucic still controls a battery of powerful media weapons, such as the private television station Pink, which remains without more faithful. And a series of vitriol tabloids shows no sign of faltering in their support to the president.
Tabloid as Informer, a particularly vicious attack dog for the government, saved activists as traitors who serve nearby Croatia, Serbia’s main enemy during the wars of the early 90s on the ruins of Yugoslavia.
Mila Pajic, a university student in Novi Sad Active in the organization of protests, said he was represented by the media aligned with the government as “mentally unstable”. He was demonized as an anti-Serba, with Informer who published a video of her who discussed with his boyfriend and stating that the couple was fighting for clandestine funding from abroad. He accused her of being in league with Croatia.
The story of the tabloid, he said, “was completely invented” and transformed “a normal discussion between two 20 -year -old people into a national scandal”.
He said that the passage of the state broadcaster to the most inclusive coverage of protests “is not a big step forward but a small step in the right direction”.
Vladisavljevic, the politician of Belgrade, interpreted the report of the government party of RTS journalists for their neutral coverage of events in Novi Sad as a “preventive move to keep them in line” and a heavily rural message of the party that “nothing It really changed. “
“They care that the media can turn upside down. They worry about the military, for public ministries, everyone, “he said.” But we are not yet at a turning point. “