Serbs voted “Students Win” without knowing what their program offers, it doesn’t even matter, “anyone is better than Vučić.”
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What to make of the present Serbian moment? Post-Milošević politics is closing a two-and-a-half-decade cycle, standing on the threshold of a new era whose dynamics mirror the old. But history does not repeat; it rhymes. Eerily familiar patterns, driven by traits of the collective Serbian psyche, are re-emerging, even as external and internal material conditions chart a divergent course.
Color Revolutions are quite simple on a level identical to basic marketing. Why does the average person opt to pay a considerable premium for Nikes over some generic basketball shoe? There is top-down vertical advertising at the first level, but this is later surpassed by horizontal peer to peer viralization which leverages on social acceptance. Here this is a simple combination of Edward Bernays’ 1923 work, Crystalizing Public Opinion, his 1928 work, Propaganda, combined with Gustav Le Bon’s 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Then of course there are Saul Alinsky, Gene Sharp, and Sharp’s student and Otpor! leader, Srđa Popović. But since the Arab Spring series of Color Revolutions, social media starting with Twitter became a critical factor.
There resides a great strength in social media, the TikTok generation, which also characterized by and large the foreign NGO-backed “Student” movement itself. The “Student list” came to power without clearly communicating to its own voters what exactly they would do on economic, territorial, and foreign policy matters if elected. On October 26th, they were placating Serbian nationalists and Eurosceptics on Russian television to absolve them of fears which in reality they are justified in having. We saw this also with Magyar in Hungary, so this part of the play’s script was not only already rehearsed, but had seen its opening night in the Hunnic lands to the north. But the “Student List” color revolutionaries did not wait long, on October 27th, Ilija Srdanović, lead candidate of the Student List told the U.S. funded Radio Free Europe that the new government will continue EU integration and the EU-mediated dialogue with Pristina, we presume, towards Kosovo recognition.
Screenshot from RFE/RL Interview with Srdanovic
What Serbs before the election were told by the “Student List” was “Trust me, bro”, a gamble that a “majority” of people in the small Balkan country were apparently willing to take. We will not even discuss the improbability of over 600,000 new voters rising from graves or crawling out of strollers to vote, as Vučić is not challenging the results, even though the “Student List” Color Revolutionaries expected him to.
That fact alone relates to a broader economic and military crisis which looms overhead, and will be the subject of further analysis which will better explain why Vučić is in the optimal position politically as an opposition leader over the course of the coming years. But on that note, our prior analysis of the EU/NATO drive to war with Russia in 2029/2030 is all but certain; see Still a failure: The City of London backs EU’s €90 billion Ukraine war-chest.
The vaguemaxxing approach perfected at Occupy Wall Street sixteen years ago allowed the anti-Vučić opposition to present as a Rorschach blot of sorts; appearing as anti-EU/NATO nationalists to the nationalists and appear as pro-EU liberal to the liberals. Though, to wit, most sophisticated-enough liberals understood the strategy: to fool the “under-educated, Orthodox, working class, country-bumpkin nationalists”. This is part of the problem of the Serbian professional managerial class “intelligentsia” as Archibald Reiss understood over a century ago, and as we will discuss later on in this piece.
To understand the present moment requires grasping the years of betrayal that followed the post–Cold War era’s first color revolution, which unfolded in Belgrade twenty-six years ago. We outline those fifteen years before the rise of the Serbian Progressive Party for two important reasons; first to set the record straight on the actual condition of the “selling out” of Serbia as those new to the Serbia story are prone to believe the “Student list” ADHD propaganda that Vučić did these things, and second, perhaps more importantly, as a funhouse mirror forecast of sorts, given that we are nearing the start of a new rhyming historical cycle (back towards chaos and betrayals). However, the broader global context has changed. NATO is in a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Serbia is threatened on all sides, and is obviously both the lowest hanging fruit and the “punching bag” for the EU/NATO: what they cannot inflict upon Russia, they will inflict upon Serbia, which they regard as “little Russia”.
October 5th – The “Bulldozer Revolution” – Color Revolutionaries storm the Parliament building and overthrow Milošević
Recall back in October, 2000; after winning the election, DOS (Demokratska opozicija Srbije), whose representative at the time was Vojislav Koštunica, the ruling party Socialists hastily betrayed and extradited their man, former president Slobodan Milošević, to an ad hoc tribunal established by bodies that had no jurisdiction over it. Immediately before the election, the sentiment of the people and the opposition movement “Otpor” was that anyone was better than Slobodan Milošević; they promised prosperity, peace and stability, a state without corruption or the mafia, and the people believed it. Following the election results, celebrations lasted for days with the slogan “He’s finished” and with hope for a better tomorrow. Their “better tomorrow” never came.
Serbia was in an abyss from 2000 all the way to 2012, around 1200 state-owned companies were sold for chump change, largely to foreign interests. These had been not only a mark of sovereignty, but also provided fair and reliable wages that working families relied upon. Because of the leaders of the DOS, Serbia was economically destroyed in the years that followed. When it was believed things couldn’t get worse, they proved Serbs wrong. Serbia was ruled by a party whose members were not in agreement regarding politics and the path they wanted to take, for all that united them was the rancid combination of Western backing and opposition to Milošević, (and this is the same contradiction we find with the “Student government” today).
This was evidenced again in 2003 with the extradition of the president of the opposition Radical Party, Vojislav Šešelj, to the Hague Tribunal, where he remained until 2014 and was never convicted, and released and returned to Serbia in 2016 as the result of back-channel work done under Vučić in coordination with the Radical Party (an effort which this author participated). Later in that same year of 2003, just a month after Šešelj’s extradition, Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić was likely assassinated by members of the Serbian security establishment who feared that Đinđić would continue to extradite more Serbian patriots, which further weakened an already shaken state. Following this and the failed presidential elections, the disagreements between the leaders of DOS reached a culmination and the party split into two fronts, DS and DSS. During 2003 and 2004 Serbia had no president but rather a string of acting presidents: first Nataša Mićić (Civic Alliance of Serbia), who held that duty for three months, then Dragan Maršićanin (DSS) held the role for a month, then Predrag Marković (G17plus) performed the function for three months, after which Boris Tadić, of the Democratic Party (DS), was elected president in July 2004.
To make themselves more acceptable to EU membership, Serbian laws were changed and a new Constitution was adopted in 2006, during the term of President Tadić. In that constitution, Kosovo and Metohija were placed in the preamble of the constitution supposedly to emphasize the significance of the fact that Kosovo and Metohija is part of Serbia, forgetting to emphasize that the preamble of a constitution is not necessarily a binding part. Immediately before the adoption of the 2006 Constitution, the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro was dissolved, leaving Serbia landlocked. This was the culmination of a Western-instructed independence referendum, made possible when Serbian authorities previously signed the Belgrade Agreement to restructure relations between Serbia and Montenegro, where there we saw the renaming of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia into the Union State of Serbia and Montenegro before its eventual split. A questionable constitution was adopted. At that moment, Serbia had no real army, the “Democratic” authorities made sure of this during that period, which in turn laid the perfect groundwork for the ethnic Albanian declaration of independence of Kosovo and Metohija from Serbia in February 2008. Serbia had no army to defend it, the people took to the streets and protested, but since preserving Serbian sovereignty was not on the list of Western/NGO requirements of Serbia, nothing came of it. Nota bene: this is what happens when protests are without mass institutional support (foreign or domestic); the elites weather them and people’s spontaneous protests fizzle out and demoralization sets in. Sustained protests for years requires massive organization and high levels of funding and coordination.
After this, Serbia under Tadić signs the Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU. In 2008 Serbia experiences an economic crash during the global crisis engineered by Wall Street and the City of London (which as an aside led to the next round of Color Revolutions in the form of the Arab Spring within two years), the loss of jobs, and a spike in the euro exchange rate. After that, the then- Democratic Party (DS) authorities under President Tadić extradited more Serbian heroes to the Hague Tribunal: Republika Srpska President Radovan Karadžić in 2008, followed Ratko Mladić and Goran Hadžić in 2011, in exchange for which Serbia received candidate status for EU membership.
Archibald Reiss, the Swiss criminologist and Serbophile was so moved by the Serbian spirit, unity, and sacrifice during the First World War that he made Serbia his home, but in equal measure found himself outraged and indeed demoralized by the levels of corruption, opportunism, and classism among the elites both during and after the war. His insights into the Serbian mentality tell us a lot about what we have just seen, or rather, why things played out the way they did. Reiss meticulously dissected the tragic rift between the noble, heroic ordinary people and a self-serving, corrupt intellectual and political elite. Reiss would have viewed the foreign-backed NGO color revolution that ousted Vučić as little more than another manifestation of the Serbian elite’s moral decay, naivety, and subservience to external powers, and also their sense of entitlement lording over the Serbian masses, in Ottoman style, but worse for it requires manipulating and playing upon Serbian patriotism, sense of duty, and their deep rooted commitment to both personal and collective freedom. Reiss would sharply lament how the populace, endowed with immense bravery yet often prone to political short-sightedness and easily gas-lit by grand rhetoric, allowed themselves to become pawns in a geopolitical game orchestrated by foreign money and nefarious interests. He would fiercely criticize the urban “intelligentsia” and opportunistic political actors for their uncritical envy and imitation of foreign masters (what today we would call a product of autochauvinism combined with foreign soft power acculturation), pointing out that in exchanging one ostensibly “corrupt autocrat” for leaders beholden to external NGOs, Serbia merely traded internal political clientelism for foreign subservience. To Reiss, actual national sovereignty and social justice could never be gifted by foreign-funded apparatuses; rather, by relying on foreign interventions instead of conducting a deep, self-reliant moral regeneration from within, Serbians had once again fallen victim to their tragic flaw: letting the “king of money” and corrupt elites dictate their destiny while losing sight of their own authentic identity.
Čujte Srbi: čuvajte se sebe – by Rodolphe Archibald Reiss
Reiss observed that the Serbian political elite and the self-proclaimed intelligentsia flipped wildly between a sense of superiority over their own populace and deep-seated envy of wealthier, more advanced foreign nations. Their idea of modernizing Serbia was not to build on authentic national virtues, but to copy external models superficially (today, the EU or the ‘Nordic model’) while harboring a hidden disdain for the common Serbian peasant (Vučić voters, derided as Sendvučić, voting in exchange for sandwiches). Modernization, in that sense, was a vanity project rather than a matter of national survival.
Magyar offers congratulations to the Student List
So now here in late October 2026 we hear “He’s finished” on the streets. Once again, Serbs have bought the lie. Once again a state without corruption, without a mafia was promised. Serbs voted “Students Win” without knowing what their program offers, it doesn’t even matter, “anyone is better than Vučić.” The paradox is that now the state will be led by the very people who ruined it in the period from 2000 to 2012 and to finish everything they couldn’t back then. We can forecast the return of the Hungarian separatist movement in Vojvodina, which flourished in the early 2000s with the support of the Provincial Government headed by Bojan Pajtić in the period from 2004 to 2009, who is now on the Students Win parliamentary list. Without Orbán in Hungary, and specifically with Magyar there in charge, we can all but guarantee it. But as we have said, war is on the horizon. Where the Russian army situates by 2028 will determine much. Where the U.S. will situate after presidential elections in November of that same year will determine the rest.
Follow Joaquin Flores on Telegram @NewResistance or on X/Twitter @XoaquinFlores
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