Serbia's chosen son, in just three months, how can Vucic turn public opinion around?
At about 23:00 local time on the 3rd, Serbian President Vucic announced to the media at the headquarters of the Forward Party led by him that he won the first round of presidential elections. He said that in the presidential election, according to Kadima statistics, his vote was between 59.9 and 61 percent.
At 7 o'clock local time on the 3rd, the 2022 Serbian president, parliament and local elections began to vote. According to Serbian media reports, the election has a total of 8 candidates running for the presidency, and 19 political parties or party alliances competing for 250 seats in the parliament, which is unprecedented.
Serbia votes in the general election of Vucic
According to Serbian media reports, the current Serbian President Vucic first took office in 2017, according to the Serbian constitution, the president's term is 5 years, can be re-elected once, so Vučić, who has been active in politics, announced his intention to be re-elected early.
And the Serbian people really like Vucic the most. Vučic's popular support is close to 60 percent, far outpacing all other candidates, and its ruling Serbian Forward Party also ranks first among all participating parties with about 50 percent support.
Serbian law stipulates that presidential candidates who receive more than 50 per cent of the vote in the first round of voting will win the election, so from this level of support, Vucic's re-election is already a foregone conclusion.
Vucic
But interestingly, just a few months ago, serbia's opposition parties seemed likely to be able to turn things around.
Last July, the Vučić government announced the signing of a $2.4 billion lithium project with Australian mining giant Rio Tinto to provide high-quality lithium batteries for Europe's burgeoning electric vehicle industry.
Rio Tinto originally expected that the mine would produce 58,000 tons of finished battery-grade lithium carbonate per year at full capacity, enough to supply lithium batteries for 1 million electric vehicles, making Serbia the largest producer of lithium ore in Europe and providing at least 2,000 jobs for Serbia.
But it was such a win-win cooperation project that was quickly boycotted by Serbian environmentalists after it was announced. As recently as last December, opposition parties also saw the political value of this boycott. After the latter stepped in, the environmental movement quickly disengaged and eventually turned into a political event in which thousands of Serbs took to the streets to boycott Vučić's government at the end of December.
Unable to withstand the pressure, Vučić's government finally announced on January 21 this year that it would abandon the mining project completely, and the event was seen as a rare major failure in the powerful president's political career. Considering that the election would be held in just three months, the Western media at the time generally predicted that Vucic's presidential career would end here.
As a result, Vucic's approval rating has now turned upside down, and there is no suspense even before the election results come out. With such a huge contrast in just three months, what happened to serbia as a country?
Lithium mine protests
To talk about this topic, it is necessary to touch on a key term - "Greater Serbianism".
Serbia is located in the central region of the Balkan Peninsula in southeastern Europe, with a land area of 88,000 square kilometers (including Kosovo) and a population of 7.18 million, which is a typical landlocked small country. Historically, the natives founded their state as early as the middle of the 10th century under the name "Serbia" until it was annexed by the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 15th century.
The Islamic rule of the Ottoman Empire lasted for more than 4 centuries. It was common sense that such a long time was enough to completely Islamize the Serbs, but Serbia was ethnically Yugoslav and had converted to Orthodoxy before the Ottoman Empire, so that both ethnically and religiously, the Serbs were inseparable from their rulers: in the eyes of the Serbs, the Ottoman Empire was a bunch of invaders and a damn religious heretic.
So when the Ottoman Empire finally began to withdraw from the Balkans and Serbia in the second half of the 19th century, the Serbs, who had persisted in fighting against the Balkans for more than 400 years under this severe pagan rule, also degenerated into one of the most nationally independent peoples in the Balkans, and this nationalist plot later resounded throughout the European continent under the name of "Greater Serbianism" - the assassin who caused the First World War by assassinating the Crown Prince of austria-Hungary was a fanatical "Greater Serbian." ".
Sarajevo incident
The so-called "Greater Serbianism" refers to the desire of Serbs to establish a multi-ethnic centralized state in the Balkan Peninsula with the Serbs as the core, but this national fanaticism has also become the source of various tragedies in Serbia for more than a hundred years.
After the victory in World War I, Serbia, which had followed the Entente in victory, was able to unify most of the Balkan Peninsula in the name of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but this also caused serious dissatisfaction among other minorities, especially the Catholic Croats. So during World War II, croats who were eager to break away from Serb rule took the initiative to defect to Nazi Germany and engaged in extremely bloody mutual hatred with the Serbs, which led to the establishment of a feud between the two communities that continues to this day;
However, due to the geopolitical struggle of the great powers after World War II, the Serbs had to once again form the "Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" together with several surrounding ethnic groups, including the enemy Croats. The problem, however, is that Tito, the central political figure that maintains this "Yugoslav" unity, is a Croat with a clear tendency to discriminate against Serbs, while the dominant ethnic group of this "Yugoslavia" is Serbs;
Tito
As a result, the mutual hatred between Serbs and Croats was further deepened during the long cold war era, and in contrast, "Greater Serbianism" was once again popular among Serbs during this period and eventually became one of the central factors that led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991.
However, the Serbs who contributed to the disintegration of Yugoslavia because of "Greater Serbianism" also intended to form a state with Serbs as the core on the corpse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which is also known as the "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" - "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia".
This very "Greater Serbian" approach naturally attracted collective opposition from other minorities that had long aspired to secession. In particular, croats, who have a blood feud with the Serbs, firmly oppose this practice and openly send troops to support Bosnia and Herzegovina's independence from Yugoslavia. Coupled with the Kosovo crisis triggered by The Albanians who believe in Islam, the Balkans are once again in a genocidal crisis.
The resentment of the Serbs lies in the fact that at this time, the Western world was mixed in, and it resolutely sided with the Croatian and other minorities, and blew up the "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" alive until it disintegrated with a 78-day continuous bombing campaign, which once again completely shattered the dream of "Greater Serbianism" of the Serbs.
Flag of Serbia
Only after sorting out the chaos can we truly understand the main theme of contemporary Serbian society: a highly nationalist fanaticism that has swept the whole people, and this fanaticism is based on an equally fanatical anti-Western sentiment.
Only by understanding this mainstream political tendency of Serbian society can we also understand why Vucic is fanatically sought after by Serbs:
In 1998, At the age of 28, Vucic was promoted to the post of minister of information of the "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia", and in this position he personally experienced NATO's indiscriminate bombardment of the "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" and the subsequent disintegration of the "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" and the independence of Kosovo, which made the Serbs heartbroken.
There is no doubt that after this baptism, the idea of "Greater Serbianism" and the antipathy to the West have been successfully rooted in the DNA of Vucic; in the eyes of the Serbs, the most "rooted and red" Vučić is also the greatest hope for their troubled nation to rekindle the dream of "Greater Serbia".
Of course, after so many tribulations, Serbia is not all fanatical "Greater Serbianism", especially under the material temptation of the West, many Serbs have long realized that life is more important, and therefore have their hearts set on the West, and at the end of last year, the environmentalists and opposition parties who challenged the Vucic government in the name of environmental protection are typical representatives of this.
However, the good fortune of Vucic and the "Greater Serbians" is that, just a month later, Russia launched an all-out war against Ukraine, and the judged Vucic quickly seized the opportunity, on the one hand, by not following the Western position of sanctioning Russia, which greatly won the favor of the domestic "Greater Serbian" camp and pro-Russian people; on the other hand, announced that it would not intervene in any form of Russian-Ukrainian war - on the contrary, By all means, efforts were made to maintain Serbia's social and economic stability during this turbulent period – and thus to win the favour of most of the country's ordinary population.
From this political iq, it is already predestined that Vucic, the "chosen son" of the Serbs, can achieve an earth-shattering reversal of popular support within three months.