Robots, a Drone and a 500-Meter Flag for June 27 Rally

Two days before the gathering, organizers of the „Serbia One Family” rally released drone footage of the plaza outside Serbia’s National Assembly, where people use their bodies to spell out the rally’s name. The clip was published as a teaser for what is being staged on June 27 in central Belgrade, and it arrived alongside a list of props that shifts the event from the category of a political rally toward that of a staged spectacle.

The central visual, organizers say, will be the longest Serbian flag to date. The banner is roughly 500 meters long and nearly 4,000 square meters in area, weighing more than 800 kilograms, and is meant to be carried across the plaza by over 1,000 people. The logistics of a prop that size are no small matter, since they require coordinating a large number of carriers in the confined space in front of the parliament building.

Alongside the flag, the program features robots shipped from China, programmed to dance the moravac to the accompaniment of a young accordion player. There is also a children’s program, with workshops and a play, plus a full day of music with performances by well-known artists. The rally is therefore designed as an all-day event aimed at audiences of every age.

What exactly will be voted on at the rally?

The most concrete political content of the gathering involves the ballot boxes. According to organizers, attendees will receive ballots on site on which they pick five of 15 offered development themes. Those fifteen themes become, in the staging of the event, the main prop around which a message about jointly planning the future is built, so the result of that vote will likely be presented as the will of those gathered.

It is worth being precise about what this exercise is and is not. It carries no status of an electoral or referendum act and produces no legal consequences. It is a survey-style, symbolic vote within a single rally, whose value is primarily political and communicational rather than institutional. Keeping those two registers apart, street-level expressions of opinion and constitutionally prescribed procedures, will be key to reading the messages put out after June 27.

Why was the date set for late June?

President Aleksandar Vucic announced that on June 27, 28 and 29 he will present a plan for the future and, on that occasion, reveal the name of his electoral list. That turns the three-day block into a kind of pre-election overture, in which the rally outside parliament serves as the visual frame and the announcement of the list as the political content that follows immediately after it.

Staging an event like this outside the National Assembly is not a neutral choice of location. The plaza in front of parliament is where various gatherings have alternated throughout the recent electoral cycle, so every new occupation of that space also sends a message about who currently holds the initiative on the street. The opposition, for its part, has organized its own rallies on the same plaza for years, which makes the space a symbolic stage where both sides measure their strength.

It remains an open question how much of June 27 will be remembered for its messages, and how much for the robots, the drone and the half-kilometer flag. What do you think, do spectacles like this shift the political terrain, or do they just fill the clips that get shared online afterward?