Saturday 28 June marked a new attempt by the masses to impose a solution to their eight-month-long confrontation with President Aleksandar Vučić. A mass demonstration of 150,000 people swept Belgrade. Chants of “Uhapsite Vučića!” (“Arrest Vučić!”) reverberated across streets and squares. Demands for early elections were also forcibly put forward. The struggle has been ongoing continuously since the collapse of the railway station canopy in Novi Sad on 1 November, which killed 16 people, and which exposed the systemic failure and corruption of the regime.

The students leading the ongoing protests across Serbia recently announced that they are demanding early parliamentary elections, in which the students will propose their own list of candidates. All opposition media outlets loudly reported this statement, and the masses expressed their support out of trust in the students. Some activists have gone as far as to say that anyone who is in favour of bringing down the regime of Aleksandar Vučić will support this demand.

On 3 and 4 May, members of the Revolucionarni Komunistički Savez (Revolutionary Communist League, RCL) met in Zagreb for this year’s congress. Delegates from Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia were present as members of the Yugoslav section of the Revolutionary Communist International (RCI). They were joined by guests from Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy, Britain, and Kosovo.

Since the collapse of the Novi Sad station canopy on 1 November 2024, which killed 16 people, occupations, blockades and protests led by students have been organised across Serbia. This calamity, caused by corruption, sparked a wave of indignation throughout the country. At the time of writing this article in April, over a million people across Serbia have taken part and voiced their support for the students’ demands. Demonstrations are being held throughout the country.

In Belgrade, Serbia, on 15 March, saw what was undoubtedly the largest protest in the history of Serbia. According to the Archive of Public Gatherings, it numbered around 300,000 people, with many estimating that it was even larger.

Since our previous article, events in Serbia have accelerated rapidly. The government hoped that the holidays and extended school winter break would lead to fatigue in the movement, but the students, who are occupying their universities, did not allow the movement to dissipate. A large protest was held in front of the offices of the Serbian secret services on 11 January as a response to threats. They continued their strategy of 15 minute road blockades demanding justice for the 15 people murdered by the fall of the concrete canopy of the reconstructed railway station in Novi Sad.

In November, a concrete canopy collapsed at the newly inaugurated train station in Novi Sad, killing 15. Since then, a huge protest movement has swept the country, condemning the criminal negligence of the authorities which led to this tragedy. This movement has continued to escalate, with a series of student occupations and calls for a general strike.

The collapse of the concrete canopy at the train station in Novi Sad on 1 November, in which 15 people were killed, was the straw that broke the camel’s back for many in Serbia. Among the victims, a large number of them young people and children, two are still in critical condition.

Recently, Serbia has once again been shaken by mass protests that brought tens of thousands to the streets. This is round two of the fight against Rio Tinto, a notorious multinational mining company that is trying to start operations in the west of the country. This is also the sixth time in the last eight years that mass protests against the regime of Aleksandar Vučić have been organised in Serbia.

We republish here a very interesting letter written in 1915 by Serbian socialist Dušan Popović to Christian Rakovsky, the great Balkan internationalist. The letter was published by Nashe Slovo (Our Word), a daily Russian language socialist newspaper published in France during the First World War and edited by Leon Trotsky. We think it contains crucial lessons for the attitude of Marxists towards imperialist war, and the way in which imperialist powers use the rights of nations as a pretext for their real aims.

On 27 November, protests broke out against amendments to the Referendum Law – eliminating the need for a 50 percent turnout of adult citizens to ensure the validity of the referendum – as well as against the Expropriation Law – making it easier for the state to expropriate the private property of ordinary working class people. All this is being declared as “in the public interest” – by which, of course, are meant the interests of big business.

Weeks after declaring a landslide electoral victory, the regime of Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party is facing growing dissatisfaction and civil unrest. There are many legitimate reasons for the unrest. Most people are angry over the criminal mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis, and deeply concerned about the looming economic disaster. Up to 300,000 workers are expected to lose their jobs this autumn. However, the protests erupting all over the country are mostly amorphous, relatively small in size and without clear demands. This makes them easy pickings for right wing provocateurs and an unprecedented campaign of police brutality and state

Several organisations, including the Yugoslav IMT Marxist Organisation ‘Reds’, have mobilised together in a united front as the ‘Left Bloc’ for several weeks as part of mass protests in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Zrenjanin. The Bloc put forward social demands in the demonstrations, instead of the merely civil and democratic demands presented by the organisers from the opposition.

Long hailed as a success story and as a model for the future of Serbian industry, the Fiat factory in Serbia stopped working a few days ago, when its production workers went on an all-out strike.

The break up of the former Yugoslav federation has been a disaster for all its peoples. There is nothing progressive about it whatsoever. In all the states that have been created from the break up, reactionary governments have come to power. Tudjman in Croatia and Milosevic in Serbia do not defend the interests of the Croat or the Serb workers. The same is true of Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Slovenia.