Are the Blockades Fading? Vucic Says Support Drops

President Aleksandar Vucic and officials of the Serbian Progressive Party have in recent days repeated the same assessment: participants in the blockades, and the opposition that backs them, are losing public support by the day. The message comes just as organizers announce that intersection blockades will continue across several cities, so the political debate now turns less on whether blockades exist than on how many people actually stand behind them.

Dragan Djilas, one of the opposition leaders, rejects that claim. In his words, both the opposition and the civic movement are standing strong, and the talk of collapsing support is part of a government campaign to downplay the protests ahead of a possible election cycle. That opens a familiar dispute in which both sides read opposite conclusions from the same streets: one sees attrition, the other endurance.

How accurate is Vucic’s claim about falling support?

The answer from independent observers is not black and white. Political scientist Nikola Parun assesses that turnout at the street blockades is visibly lower than at the earlier mass student protests, the ones that brought tens of thousands to city squares over the previous months. A smaller crowd at intersections, however, does not automatically mean less support for the goals of the protest, because a street blockade demands a different and riskier kind of engagement than a one-off appearance at a large rally.

Editor Djordje Vukadinovic strikes a similar tone, recalling that support for the student protests peaked at about 60 percent of citizens, and that today’s support for the street blockades, as a specific tactic, sits below that earlier figure. The distinction, then, is between two things that political messaging often merges: the public mood toward the movement’s demands, and the willingness to defend those demands by blocking traffic. The first can stay high even as the second declines.

That is precisely the nuance the government’s communication leaves out. When the president says the blockades are losing support, he is counting the crowd at the intersection. When the opposition replies that they are standing strong, it is measuring sentiment toward the government itself. Both claims can be partly true at once, which is exactly why the argument never ends.

What do the blockades mean for the economy and the next move?

Former prime minister and SNS official Milos Vucevic has shifted the debate from numbers to consequences. He warns that intersection blockades hurt the economy and citizens’ living standards, from disrupted traffic and deliveries to losses for local businesses, arguing that citizens should see what kind of Serbia is offered by those who block cities. That argument is a political calculation: rather than contest the right to protest, the government seeks to pin responsibility for daily inconvenience on the organizers.

The organizers, for their part, announce that the blockades will not stop but will spread to new intersections in more cities, arguing that street pressure is the only tool left to them until an election date is called. The conflict thus moves into a prolonged contest of endurance, in which the government counts on public fatigue and the movement counts on a symbolic but persistent presence at intersections to keep the issue alive.

The open question is whose measurement will ultimately decide it: the head count at the intersection cited by the government, or the sentiment toward the government invoked by the opposition. Do you believe the blockades are weakening, or that their support is simply changing shape?