Protests in Serbia against back-to-back mass shootings last month ballooned into the biggest street demonstrations in the capital Belgrade on Saturday since the ouster of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
Weekly “violence against Serbia” protests have been gaining momentum since early May after two massacres – one at a school in Belgrade, the second in a nearby village – killed 18 people and sparked a wave of public resentment against critics of the country’s strongman leader. , Aleksandar Vucic, denounced the “culture of violence” propagated by the government and loyalist media.
Saturday’s protest, the fifth and largest so far, increased pressure on Mr. Vucic to meet some of the protesters’ demands. Those demands include firing senior law enforcement officials and revoking broadcast licenses from pro-government television stations notorious for airing violent reality shows and ignoring opposition politicians.
“Enough is enough,” Zoran Kecic, a satirist and television presenter, told the protesters. “Enough with violence, enough with hate and threats, enough with humiliation.”
For nearly a decade, Mr. Protests against Vucic’s increasingly authoritarian rule, though peaceful so far, have grown widely.
Mr. Vucic began his political career as a radical nationalist during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, but in recent years has sought to present himself as a pro-European leader eager to revive Serbia’s stalled efforts to join the European Union. He has blocked sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine, but Serbia voted at the United Nations to condemn Moscow.
Many protesters on Saturday called for Mr. Vucic to resign, and one group released helium balloons carrying a banner with the message “Vucic Go Away” under a large picture of the president, which took off into the sky.
The president, who won re-election in a landslide last year, is determined to dismiss the protests as a “political stunt” by his opponents.
Unlike the massive protests involving soccer hooligans and arson in October 2000 that demanded the resignation of Mr. Milosevic, under whom Mr. Vucic served as information minister, Saturday’s demonstration was peaceful except for a few clashes between protesters and pro-government activists.
Mr Vucic has faced – and survived – large street protests in the past, but none as large as Saturday’s. Previous protests, led by opposition parties and marred by violence incited by government supporters, have all but fizzled.
But demonstrator Ivan Ivanovic, 48, noted that in contrast to previous rounds of street demonstrations, the anti-violence protests were only growing in size.
“The motivation is very strong – in a sad way. It’s not about the opposition. It’s people who are fed up with it,” he said.
