In a taxi back from Slavija: three people, three Serbias
A reportage-essay from Saturday night, when Belgrade was making its way home. The driver, a passenger who had been at the rally, and a passenger who had not, in the same car, on the Slavija to Banovo Brdo route.
A note on the format. This is a reportage-essay, not a classical journalistic reportage. The conversation I reconstruct here took place in a Pink Taxi car, route Slavija to Banovo Brdo, around 22:15 on Saturday 23 May. I noted the details on my phone during the ride. I did not ask for names (the driver and other passengers are described only by appearance), and nothing was recorded. This is not an interview in the sense of journalistic discipline, it is a sociological observation from the field. The difference matters.
Three of us got into the taxi, the driver waiting. Myself, a man in his late fifties in a blazer-jacket and with a noticeable tiredness, a younger man around twenty-eight with a backpack, glasses and wet shoes, and a middle-aged woman in a white shirt stained with something resembling coffee and a bag from a Maxi supermarket. Destination: Mostarska Petlja, then Banovo Brdo. The driver asked at once, “are you from the rally?” The younger one said “I am.” The woman said “I’m from the shop, but I did see it.” I said nothing.
The younger one began to speak, not too loudly, about how it had all gone: how the column from Vozdovac set off at 18:00, how by 19 and something it was impossible to breathe in the centre, how the main stage was better organised than expected. He spoke quickly, using words like “atmosphere”, “fantastic”, “different”. Then, when he mentioned police force outside Pioneer Park, his voice changed. “We were in the middle of the column when it started, we didn’t see, but we heard, and it was clear that something was being prepared.” The driver listens, keeps two fingers on the wheel, looks in the rear-view mirror, makes no comment.
The woman speaks up, not aggressively, but with a claim on the space of the conversation: “I just don’t understand how young people have time for all that. Today I worked until eight. There’s plenty to do at Maxi. Tomorrow morning at seven again.” The young man answered her with something that surprised me: he did not say “but it is for your future”, did not say “because it has to be”, he only said “I understand.” And he fell silent. After a pause she added: “I voted for them in the nineties, then for the others, then for these now, then for no one. Now I don’t know.” The sociological significance of this statement is greater than it appears. A voter who has grown weary is not a voter who has changed their mind, they are a voter who has exited the system.
The driver then chose to speak. Not too loud, not aggressive, but firm: “I’m from Loznica. There’s no work there. I drive a taxi in Belgrade because my son and daughter are here, so I save by going home every other week. If a protest brings this government down, others come, still no work in Loznica. I understand the young people here, but I have to think about Loznica.” The younger man with the backpack then asked a question that startled me: “And do you think a protest could bring something to Loznica as well?” The driver answered “no.” Quickly, dryly, without explanation.
What remains, sociologically
I pivot for a moment from the reportage tone to analysis, because without it this text would be anecdote, not commentary. The three people in that taxi are not a representative sample (a sociologist who would claim that is not a sociologist), but something already known from empirical research is condensed here. CRTA’s “Voters in Serbia” research (2024) and NDI’s “Public Opinion Poll” (2025) show three groups that one will almost never find at a single protest gathering: younger urban professionals who are critical of the authorities and who come out; women on lower incomes working two or three jobs and with no time for civic engagement; and people from the interior whose economic survival depends on the central state or on its partners. All three profiles sat down in that taxi.
The academic framework, if one looks for a name, is the concept of “atomised society”, developed by Hannah Arendt in “Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951), and applied by domestic sociologists (Bolcic, Cvejic, Pesic) to the post-socialist transition. Arendt argued that societies in which traditional networks (religious, class-based, trade-union, professional) had been dismantled become vulnerable to authoritarian narratives, not because they are naive, but because they no longer have common languages in which to formulate an alternative. What I saw in the taxi was precisely that: three people with different life reasons, with different economic interests, who converse calmly in one car, but without a shared grammar that would turn “I understand” into shared action.
Now I must bring in a counter-argument. There is a reading, often heard in left-wing criticism of the student movement, according to which the young man with the backpack is class-privileged, the woman from Maxi is the representative of the working majority, and the driver from Loznica is the voice of “real Serbia” that the students ignore. That dichotomy is attractive, but sociologically inaccurate. The young man with the backpack was not a Belgrade middle-class kid, he was a student organiser who works weekends in a restaurant kitchen, which I learned in the last five minutes of the ride. The woman was not a “working majority”, she lives in Banovo Brdo, an urban precarious worker, which is a different profile. The driver from Loznica is not “real Serbia”, he is a man who is aware of the clientelistic logic he lives in and of the choices that follow from it. All three positions are more complicated than the categories political campaigns use, which is why campaigns, of left and right alike, lose.
I return to leaving the taxi. The driver said “have a safe trip.” The young man with the backpack paid by card and got out first, at Mostarska Petlja. The woman got off at Banovo Brdo, with her Maxi bag, without looking back. The driver and I drove back towards the centre, in silence. Before I got out, he said one more thing: “You see, sir, things won’t be good, but we don’t know to whom it will be worse. You won’t write that, because you don’t want to; I say it because I see it from the road.” That is a sentence I will not comment on. There is something in it that a reportage-essay would spoil if it explained it. I leave it there, like Arendt’s “atomised society”, translated from one night in Belgrade, in Pink Taxi car number 7842.
