Citizen Assemblies Take Over Serbia's Road Blockades

Serbia’s wave of civil disobedience has entered a new phase. After unmet ultimatums and a string of arrests, local citizen assemblies have decided to take on what students carried for months: blocking traffic in their own municipalities. Over the past several days, intersections, roads and streets have been shut in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Nis and other cities, in some places alongside counter-gatherings of government supporters at the very same spots.

This marks a shift in the movement’s center of gravity. Instead of central student columns, it is now neighborhoods and local communities that decide on their own when and where traffic stops. From what we understand, the model is spreading precisely because it is harder to shut down: there is no single leadership to detain, no single column to disperse.

Why are blockades passing into the hands of citizen assemblies?

The answer lies in two overlapping points. The first is disappointment with earlier ultimatums. The demand to call elections and release detained protest participants was, in the organizers’ view, left without a concrete government response, so citizens turned to direct action in their own districts.

The second point is legal. The Academic Crisis Center, a body drawn from part of the academic community, has taken on the role of coordinating legal aid. According to the center, its lawyers have intervened in more than 150 detention cases, connecting detained students and professors with defense attorneys. That has created a parallel support system that gets a lawyer to a detainee within a few hours, which was not the case before.

All of this changes the dynamic on the street. When someone taking part in a blockade knows a defense lawyer awaits them at the police station, the threshold of fear drops. In political terms, that is a serious development, because the movement no longer depends on individual courage but on an organized network.

What is the government saying, and what do citizens want?

The state leadership, for its part, is sending the opposite message. Milos Vucevic, an official of the ruling coalition, said that “the majority of Serbia has rejected the blockades” and that poll support for the government is rising precisely because, as he put it, roads are being built while others block traffic. That formula, “while some block, others build,” has become the backbone of the government’s response to the protests and is repeated in appearances by senior party figures.

At some intersections, government supporters turned out to face the blockaders, adding tension to neighborhoods that until yesterday knew only of neighborly disputes over parking. Politics, quite literally, has moved to the sidewalk.

The demands of the citizen assemblies, however, have not changed. They call for elections and the release of everyone detained during the protests. What is new is the form of resistance: instead of occasional large rallies, these are daily, decentralized blockades that test the endurance of both sides.

The open question concerns the sustainability of this model itself. Decentralized blockades are harder to shut down, but they are also harder to steer toward a concrete political outcome. Will the citizen assemblies manage to turn daily pressure at the intersections into a bargaining position, or will the energy burn out in an exhausting war of nerves with the government?