Blockades Persist as Vucevic Says Majority Rejects Them

Milos Vucevic, leader of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), said on Saturday, July 12, at a St. Peter’s Day gathering in Dulene near Kragujevac, that the organizers of the blockades had made a serious political mistake and that a majority of Serbia’s citizens did not stand behind their demands. His remarks came as road blockades and acts of civil disobedience continue across the country.

Addressing the crowd, Vucevic argued that what he called the “majority Serbia” had rejected the blockades as a method and that the organizers lacked the support they claim to have. In the same speech, he announced that the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections would be the decisive political test that, in his words, would reveal the true will of voters.

On the other side, the protests show no sign of fading. The blockades are coordinated through a network of more than 100 local citizens’ assemblies, which operate without a single party leadership and decide on their own when and where to act. That decentralized structure makes it hard to estimate the real number of participants, and equally hard for the government to negotiate with any clearly defined counterpart.

How many people really stand behind each side?

The numbers have become a battleground of their own. The government says that anti-blockade rallies, held in 95 locations, drew more than 103,000 people, and it uses that figure as proof that a silent majority does not support the shutdown of traffic and universities. The assembly organizers and part of the independent press dispute those counts and, in turn, point to the size of the protest marches that take place almost daily.

Independent media report continued marches, along with detentions and releases of participants and accusations of police pressure on demonstrators. The authorities reject those claims and insist that police intervention was a response to the blocking of roads rather than to the act of assembly itself. The two narratives thus differ not only in interpretation but in the basic facts about who is endangering whom.

In this climate, each side picks its own statistics. Vucevic’s appearance in Dulene is part of a broader government campaign to counter the protests with its own rallies and to turn the message about a “majority Serbia” into an electoral platform. The assemblies, for their part, are betting that persistence and a daily presence on the streets will eventually outweigh the government’s institutional advantage.

Can elections break the blockades?

The announcement of elections raises a question hanging over the whole crisis. The government presents a vote as a legitimate way to settle the dispute by counting ballots, while part of the protest movement fears that going to the polls under current conditions would only ratify a balance of power it considers unjust. Whether the assemblies will even articulate a unified position on elections remains unclear, precisely because the absence of central leadership complicates any negotiating stance.

The fact remains that two versions of Serbia are measured by the same days and the same streets, yet read them in opposite ways. One counts the crowds at its rallies, the other counts the days of blockade. What do you think, can an electoral cycle reconcile these two arithmetics, or will the blockades outlast the next trip to the ballot box?