This is an opinionated article by Engjellushe Morina, Senior Policy Fellow, and Angelica Vascotto, pan-European Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
This winter has seen Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic skating on dangerously thin ice. Mass student-led anticorruption protests have led to the resignation of the prime minister, Milos Vucevic, as well as several other members of his government. Last week, the president hinted that the turmoil could lead to a snap parliamentary election come spring.
But public anger and Vucic’s collapsing government are far from his only problems. Even before the protests, the president’s longstanding “à la carte” approach to foreign policy of hedging Serbia between the West and Russia (with a side order of China) seemed to be in trouble. Both the European Union and Russia have been pressing Belgrade to choose a side. Now, Vucic has found himself with very little international sympathy for his domestic woes—and very little room for manoeuvre.
This gives Europeans a key opportunity to help steer events towards stability and democratic progress while minimising the risk of regional spillover. To prevent prolonged instability and bring Serbia back on track, the EU should support civil society, address regional tensions, and reinforce Serbia’s European trajectory.
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It is certainly an opinion I don’t share, but it isn’t outright missinformation. I think we can survive some different opinions in the comment section if there is no brigarding or outright lies.
It is up to you, I’m not a moderator. Others in this thread appear to share my view that the said comments are highly biased, and they perfectly fit into a propaganda pattern. @bungalowtill’s comment (“another Ukraine project?”) can only be understood as a direct threat to the Serbian people demanding democracy. For example, Georgia’s Russia-linked party ‘Georgian Dream’ applied such a rhetoric in last year’s Georgian election, spreading fears among the population that Russia will attack the country if it opens to the EU and Western democracies.
But as I said, I’m not a mod. I stand by my initial remark to remove such comments, though.
Some people prefer stability over democracy. That’s a valid opinion to have, but not mine.
That said, the comparison is kinda bad anyways as Serbia is lucky to not have a land border with Russia.
@poVoq
I really wish you from the bottom of my heart that you will never be in a situation having to “choose” stability over democracy.
(In a personal note, you may read rule 4 of this community, “dehumanization.”)
Sorry, but how is that “dehumanisation”? Quite the contrary. You are the one not willing to accept that humans can have different opinions on various topics.
This is not about different views, what you are doing is extending tolerance and freedom of opinion to a narrative that comes from regimes which deny exactly this. History has shown where this leads.
No, this view doesn’t come from such regimes. It has been weaponized to some extend by such regimes, and I agree that it can be problematic, but by shutting down a view many people have you are exactly playing into the hands of such regimes.
@poVoq@slrpnk.net
This is nitpicking. What @bundalowtill and others are doing is spreading propaganda. I don’t see how you ‘play into the hands of such regimes’ if you take this down. If you don’t take this down, they spread further.
The weaponisation works like this: someone promotes what many people consider a “balanced” opinion and then waits for someone like you to show up and throw a fit and demand a removal of this “vile propaganda”. If it actually gets removed that’s a win, because then they can appear as the reasonable victims of censorship in the view of their target audience. The next step is then to promote their own propaganda platform without this “vile censorship” where they can fully control the narrative towards the then captured audience.