Serbia’s Protests Reveal How EU’s Democratic Backsliding Fuels Populist Backlash Against Illiberal Governance
Original framing: “After Hungary, Serbia takes its turn to show the power of the people” — Financial Times
The Financial Times’ framing follows a classic trickster pattern: it presents Vučić as a 'villain' whose downfall will restore order, but the real trick is that the system enabling him (EU austerity, oligarchic capture) remains untouched. Like Coyote in Native American lore, who disrupts to expose hidden truths, the protests reveal how 'democracy promotion' often serves Western geopolitics over local sovereignty. The trickster here is the EU itself—posing as a saviour while its conditions deepen the very crises it claims to solve. As Erasmus might ask: *If the people’s power is real, why does it always serve the same masters?*
Serbia’s protests are not a spontaneous 'power of the people' uprising but a symptom of a deeper crisis: the collision between EU-driven neoliberal reforms, oligarchic capture, and the limits of Western-backed 'democracy promotion.
' The Financial Times’ framing obscures how Vučić’s authoritarianism is a product of structural forces—IMF austerity, NATO’s destabilisation of the Balkans, and the EU’s conditional accession process—that prioritise regime change over systemic justice. Historical precedents from Otpor! to Latin America’s color revolutions show that such movements often fail to dismantle the oligarchic structures they oppose, instead becoming tools for elite recalibration. The trickster here is the EU itself, which frames Vučić as a rogue autocrat while its own policies deepen the very inequalities that fuel populist backlash. To break this cycle, Serbia must reject both Vučić’s illiberalism *and* the neoliberal conditions imposed by the EU, adopting models like Ecuador’s debt audits or Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting to reclaim sovereignty over its economy and institutions. The protests’ long-term success hinges on whether they can move beyond symbolic political change to address the structural drivers of inequality—something the current framing, rooted in liberal democratic triumphalism, deliberately ignores.