‘He is finished’: Serbian protesters’ fury with Vučić hits boiling point

BELGRADE — Serbian protests turned violent this week, with even President Aleksandar Vučić acknowledging that a long-running standoff with his opponents has entered “the phase of beatings,” in a TV interview Friday night.

Tense protests raged Friday evening, as tear gas billowed into the sky and heavily armed riot police deployed in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš and other locations across the country.

The most explosive skirmishes came Thursday night, when demonstrators directed “he is finished” chants at Vučić in Novi Sad as they smashed windows of the ruling party’s offices and hurled furniture into the street — a dramatic escalation in a nine-month protest movement that has gripped the country.

Scenes of riot police separating ostensibly pro-government masked hooligans from demonstrators played out in multiple cities as flares bathed the streets in bright red.

As tensions heighten, groups of pro-government football fans have appeared at protest sites and clashed with demonstrators — a pattern that opposition figures say is intended to provoke confrontations.

“People’s frustrations have really peaked and they feel like they’re in a pressure cooker that’s about to explode,” Peđa Mitrović, an opposition lawmaker, told POLITICO.

Mitrović was attacked Thursday night, taking a blow to the head as he tried to film a ruckus outside the ruling Serbian Progressive Party’s Belgrade offices — guarded at the time by masked men.

“After a masked person came over and told me to delete the recording, I refused and told them I was a parliamentarian, which is when he called for backup and a group of them started hitting me from all sides,” Mitrović explained.

He broke free and ran, but similar scenes of violence were reported nationwide, with both pro- and anti-government protesters escalating tussles.

The protests began last November after a railway station awning collapsed in Novi Sad, killing 16 people, including two young children, and leaving several others gravely injured.

What started in the form of brief vigils has since swelled into the largest protest movement in modern Serbian history, fueled by government denials that it was in any way to blame, despite accusations linking the tragedy to a state-run renovation project plagued by shoddy construction and oversight failures.

“In all these months of protest, the prosecution only recently arrested a minister and another one claims to be on sick leave and can’t be arrested. The lack of accountability has pushed people over the edge and the government is to blame,” Mitrović added.

For their part, the government said that the past few days marked the biggest uptick in violence against police, with 121 officers injured and 114 people arrested.

“Without any reason, police were massively and brutally attacked, and there were violent attempts to break through the cordons set up,” Interior Minister Ivica Dačić said at a press conference.

Warnings are growing from independent domestic analysts that Serbia may be heading toward deeper instability unless the government takes the protesters’ demands seriously.

An informal network of academics — including teachers, researchers and university faculty from Vojvodina, the region where protests first erupted — condemned the ruling party’s refusal to call elections, a key ask driving the movement.

They say Vučić “is prepared to provoke a civil war just to avoid calling for elections.”