Author: Andrew Higgins
Published on: 02/02/2025 | 00:00:00
AI Summary:
Serbian State Media Shift Tune in Coverage of Huge Protests, Testing Leader Advertisement You have been granted access, use your keyboard to continue reading. Radio Television Serbia, long a propaganda bullhorn for President Aleksandar Vucic, suddenly shifted gears and put protests in Novi Sad atop its news bulletins. "This is a small but possibly revolutionary change," says state prosecutor in Belgrade. She says longtime royalists were wavering throughout the system as "they shake off their fear" of losing state jobs or facing disciplinary action. Serbia’s bar association voted on Sunday for lawyers to suspend work for a month. Svetlana Bistrovic, 43, a nurse and mother of two, said she cheered on students blocking a major railway and road bridge in Novi Sad on Saturday. Novak Djokovic, whose family has in the past been outspoken in backing President Vucic, shows no sign of giving up. Last week he jettisoned his prime minister, Milos Vucevic, leaving the country without a government. Serbia is a “spin dictatorship,” which, like other post-communist governments in neighboring Hungary and elsewhere, “is less repressive but much more manipulative” Tabloids like Informer, a particularly vicious attack dog for the government, have savaged student activists as traitors serving neighboring Croatia, Serbia’s main enemy during the wars of the early 1990s over the ruins of Yugoslavia. Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia. The French cartoonist Riad Sattouf’s saga of his parents’ failed bicultural marriage has become a literary sensation.
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