Novi Sad Blocks Intersections Over Detained Protesters

On Wednesday morning, a day after Vidovdan, traffic blockades continued across around ten Serbian cities. Citizens and students in blockade halted the busiest intersections in Uzice, Cacak, Kraljevo, Kragujevac, Zrenjanin, Smederevo, Subotica, Pancevo, Novi Sad and Nis, and this time the trigger was clearly defined: detentions from a protest held on the eve of the holiday.

In Novi Sad, citizens’ assemblies blocked several intersections, among them those near a shopping centre and on Bulevar oslobodjenja, while traffic was diverted onto surrounding streets. Groups of students and residents kept watch through the night, let ambulances and families with children pass, and once again raised banners supporting the detained activists. Organisers announced that the blockades would continue until those held are released.

Some of the people detained after the Vidovdan protest have meanwhile been released, which assembly participants welcomed as a partial concession, but not as a reason to leave the streets. For them, the remaining detainees are reason enough to keep up the pressure.

Why are the blockades returning to intersections now?

The answer lies in the logic that has driven this wave of discontent for months. Every new detention becomes a new trigger, and an intersection, rather than a square, becomes the place where resolve is measured. The citizens’ assemblies, a network of local gatherings formed during the protests, now function as a decentralised structure that can activate a dozen cities at once, without a single centre the authorities could isolate.

That model comes at a cost. Short, repeated intersection blockades are less spectacular than large marches, but they are persistent and hard to ignore. Instead of one mass rally that ends by nightfall, the result is a series of smaller actions that return to the same points every day. For organisers it is a way to sustain pressure; for residents who are not protesting, it is a daily traffic standstill.

This is exactly where the political split over reading the same event opens up. Pro-government media and officials claim that turnout among those blocking is far lower than in earlier months and that it is now a narrowing circle of people who, as they put it, are creating traffic gridlock for ordinary citizens. Organisers and part of the opposition reject that picture, arguing that the number of participants is not the measure, endurance is, and that every new detention proves the protest still has reason to continue.

What is being demanded and how far do the blockades go?

The demand is, on paper, simple: the release of everyone detained at the protest. Beneath it, however, lies a deeper dispute over who may take to the streets and under what conditions, a dispute that has run since the first blockades became routine. The release of some of those arrested shows that pressure produces a partial result, but it does not resolve the core disagreement between those who block and those who consider them a minority.

Novi Sad has been one of the focal points of this wave before, so the continued intersection blockades in the city come as no surprise. The question is how long the model of short, repeated blockades can hold public attention before it turns into a routine that both sides accept as a condition with no end.

For now, both the authorities and the organisers have taken positions from which retreat is difficult: one side counts columns of vehicles, the other counts days of persistence. And you, when a blockade halts an intersection in your city, which of those two numbers do you see as the true measure of this summer?