Why protests in Serbia won’t lead to regime change

Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, has followed in Vladimir Putin’s footsteps this week by blaming popular protests on western meddling to discredit the opposition.  

Protests over alleged vote rigging erupted in Belgrade after Serbia’s national and municipal elections on December 17. Vučić and his Serbian Progressive party (SNS) won an emphatic victory in the national poll, with 48 per cent of the vote to the opposition’s 24 per cent. But the results were closer in the Belgrade elections, where the SNS won only a few percentage points more than the opposition coalition, Serbia Against Violence (SPN).  

The SPN has since refused to accept the election results in Belgrade, where it accuses the SNS of inflating the electoral register and bussing in voters from Republika Srpska in Bosnia to tip the election in its favour. The opposition staged two weeks of protests, culminating on Saturday when around 17,000 people took to the streets of Belgrade to demand the annulment of the elections.