Blockades in Six Cities: Police Clear Belgrade's Autokomanda

Citizens and students blocked traffic in six Serbian cities on Friday, July 11, with the sharpest confrontation unfolding at Belgrade’s Autokomanda, where riot police broke up the gathering and stopped protesters from seizing the traffic interchange again. According to citizens’ assemblies, the blockades ran simultaneously in Novi Sad, Kragujevac, Nis, Uzice and Subotica, pushing the protest wave into a new and geographically wider phase.

In Belgrade the focus fell on Autokomanda, the junction linking the motorway with the south of the city. When protesters tried to halt traffic, riot units moved into the crowd and dispersed them, then held the position to prevent another blockade. Citizens announced they would return, so a tense standoff settled over the interchange through the evening, between the police cordon and those who refused to leave.

Outside the capital, the picture varied. In Uzice, demonstrators blocked the main road to Zlatibor, one of the busiest routes in the country’s southwest, at the height of the tourist season. In Nis the blockade was staged with bicycles, and in Novi Sad one of the bridges over the Danube was closed for a second straight day. The demands did not change: snap elections and the release of those detained during earlier blockades.

Why do the blockades keep going?

The answer lies in the fact that neither side sees a reason to give way. Organizers argue that the street and the blockade are the only remaining levers of pressure, since, as they put it, the institutional path yields no results. For them, every new city on the map is proof that the protest is not a local episode but a phenomenon spreading beyond Belgrade and Novi Sad, where it began.

The government, for its part, says it will not negotiate under pressure from the street. President Aleksandar Vucic repeated the line he has held for months: that while some block, others build, and that a country cannot be run by halting traffic. Serbian Progressive Party leader Milos Vucevic went a step further, warning that behind the blockaders’ messages, as he put it, lies an intent to destabilize Serbia. That shifts the dispute from the question of elections to the question of security and order, a terrain more favorable to the authorities.

What lies ahead for both sides

The key unknown is endurance. Protests of this kind live on continuity, and the police breakup at Autokomanda shows the state is no longer willing to tolerate long road blockades. If the Belgrade scenario repeats in Uzice or Novi Sad, it opens room for the kind of incidents already seen at earlier gatherings.

For the government, the risk is different. Every dispersal hands demonstrators a fresh image and a fresh argument, and the spread of the protest into smaller towns shows the discontent is not confined to university centers. The question of snap elections, which the authorities reject for now, hangs like a sword: the longer the stalemate lasts, the harder it is to claim this is a marginal affair.

What played out at six junctions on Friday was not an ending but a new round of the same struggle. Will the next move come from the street or from the institutions, and who will be first to decide the cost of holding out has grown too high?