We, People's Power Accuses Church of Silence on Rainbow Flag

The We, People’s Power parliamentary group sent the newsroom a statement on Sunday, September 6, at 11:50 a.m., condemning a rainbow flag hung on a National Assembly window and, as the group put it, the silence of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) on the act. The group also sent a letter along with the statement asking that the text be published in full.

The trigger was the Pride Parade, held on Saturday, September 5, as part of Pride Week, which ran from August 31 to September 6. That same day a rainbow flag appeared on a window of the National Assembly building, after which, according to the statement, its removal was quickly ordered. The group claims this is not the first time such a move has occurred at the Assembly, and that it has repeated in previous years.

What the parliamentary group claims exactly

The statement is aimed most sharply at Radomir Lazovic, co-founder of the Green-Left Front (GLF) and a member of the National Assembly since 2022, and at his party.

“Radomir Lazovic and the Green-Left Front are entitled to their political views, but they have no right to turn institutions belonging to all citizens into a political stage for demonstrating their own ideology,” the group said in its statement.

The group goes on to elaborate its position on who gets to set the social norm.

“Society has the right to debate what it wants to promote as its value. No one has the right to force the citizens of Serbia to accept a particular view of family, gender, sexuality and social relations as the only permitted norm,” the group wrote in the text it submitted.

What the parliamentary group explicitly does not claim matters as well. The statement says it does not raise the question of any citizen’s right to live free of violence and discrimination, so the dispute the group is raising is not about that right, but about who gets to demonstrate it, and where.

Why a Church statement is being sought

The second part of the statement targets the Serbian Orthodox Church, which the group accuses of failing to remain, as it put it, a silent observer. The group recalls that in 2022, over EuroPride, the Church clearly spoke out against what it then called the imposition of LGBT ideology, while today, in the group’s assessment, a comparably firm and clear public response to the flag being hung inside the Assembly building itself has been missing. Alongside that argument, the group also notes that the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its classification of diseases only in 1990, citing that fact as part of a broader picture of how quickly official institutional positions can change.

The statement’s final point goes beyond the flag itself. The group argues that Serbia is expected to unconditionally accept demands coming from the West, with any disagreement instantly branded as intolerance.

“It is especially dangerous when Serbia is expected to unconditionally accept everything that comes as a demand or condition from the West, so that any disagreement is immediately branded intolerance. Serbia has the right to its own cultural, moral and value space, and no one has the right to take it away,” the group said.

The parliamentary group rounds off that thought with a sentence that, in its own reading, captures the core of the dispute.

“That is exactly why it is unacceptable that today a question can no longer even be raised about a complex social and value issue, with every disagreement branded as hatred,” the statement concludes.

Silence from the other side

Neither the Green-Left Front and Radomir Lazovic, nor the Serbian Orthodox Church, had responded to the claims in the We, People’s Power statement by the time this article was published. The newsroom will publish their response if and when it arrives.

It also remains an open question whether Assembly officials will disclose who hung the flag and who ordered its removal. The statement itself says only that the same act was recorded in previous years.