Version imprimableAleksandar Aleksandar Vučić was smiling as he announced on Sunday evening [6 April] that he would be going ‘in two or three days to the Elysée Palace’ to ‘annoy a little more those who don’t like Serbia’. In one of his endless televised addresses to the nation, which he is fond of, he had just ruled out the possibility of early elections by pulling out of his hat the name of a complete unknown, Dr Đuro Macut, who was tasked with forming the new government, the outgoing prime minister having been ‘sacrificed’ at the end of January, without calming the wave of protest that is shaking the country.
Emmanuel Macron’s invitation was reportedly extended during a telephone conversation between the two men on 30 March, but it comes across as a real provocation at a time when around a hundred students have set off on bicycles from Novi Sad on 3 April to reach Strasbourg, where they are due to arrive on 15 April to present their demands to the European institutions. In this long 1,400-kilometre race ‘to wake up Europe’, they were welcomed as heroes in Budapest - the mayor of the Hungarian capital, an opponent of Viktor Orbán, joined the Serbian diaspora - and in Vienna. In the Austrian capital, all the Balkan diasporas gathered to cheer the student cyclists in Marie-Thérèse Square, recalling that, in all their countries, ‘corruption kills’.
Since the beginning of the movement, sparked by the tragic collapse of the canopy at Novi Sad railway station on 1 November 2024, Serbian civil society has repeatedly criticised the European Union for its silence. On 20 March, five days after the largest demonstration ever organised in Belgrade, marked by the use of a hypersonic weapon by the police, the European Commissioner for Enlargement, the Slovenian Marta Kos, caused a scandal by receiving Aleksandar Vučić in Brussels and declaring that the meeting had been ‘constructive’. Faced with the rising anger in both Serbia and Slovenia, where public opinion is very supportive of the Serbian students, the commissioner merely explained that, in her role, ‘she could not have spoken to anyone else’ but the authorities.
In fact, apart from a few rhetorical calls to ‘avoid violence’, the European Union has remained silent since the beginning of the crisis. This silence, which contrasts with the attention paid to Georgia a few months ago, is tantamount to support for the Serbian regime. But why such complacency?
The European Union, which no longer has any real prospect of enlargement to offer the Balkans, is betting solely on the ‘stability’ of the region, which it believes is better guaranteed by constant compromises with authoritarian regimes such as that of Serbia. Germany, for its part, covets the Serbian lithium reserves. However, only Aleksandar Vučić’s regime is capable of guaranteeing its exploitation, which is strongly contested by the population.
Economic interests and ‘Franco-Serbian friendship’
France, for its part, signed a contract at the end of August 2024 to sell twelve state-of-the-art Rafale fighter jets to Serbia for a trifling 3 billion euros. The planes have not yet been delivered or paid for, and it is not certain that they ever will be, as it is unclear where Belgrade could find such a sum. At the time, the Elysée’s talking points explained that Serbia needed to be ‘anchored’ in the Western camp and distanced from Russia...
This is the strategy that France has stubbornly pursued since the start of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. While Serbia is the only candidate country not to apply sanctions against Russia, it would be necessary to ‘give everything’ to its cunning leader in order to try to convince him that his best friends would be in the West. In reality, promises to sell only commit those who want to believe in them, and today it is Belgrade that, thanks to these virtual Rafales, has Paris on a leash.
Economic interests are not limited to fighter planes. For several years now, France has been conducting a relatively aggressive economic diplomacy in Serbia: Vinci has got its hands on Belgrade airport and Paris dreams of selling nuclear power plants to Serbia, which dreams of acquiring them. The French engineering firm Egis has been commissioned by the Serbian Ministry of Mining and Energy to conduct a preliminary technical study. For the record, this same firm was involved in supervising the construction of the Novi Sad railway station.
By receiving Aleksandar Vučić in Paris, Emmanuel Macron is going further than any other European country in supporting a regime that is overwhelmingly rejected by its population, which cannot be explained by economic interests or an obsession with stability. Since his two official trips to Serbia, in 2019 and 2024, even mangling a few words of Serbian on occasion, the French president seems to have become infatuated with his counterpart Vučić and the old spectre of ‘Franco-Serbian friendship’ dating back to the First World War and cultivated above all in some far-right circles. Serbian students are well aware of this history but, if they sing the old song Tamo daleko, which dates from this conflict, it is to demand justice and truth.
9 April 2025
Translated by International Viewpoint from Mediapart.
