When tens of thousands of protesters blocked three key bridges across the Danube River, paralyzing Serbia’s second-biggest city this weekend, the Balkan country’s beleaguered governing party issued a stern warning — not to the protesters but to the state-controlled broadcasting service for reporting on them.
After mostly ignoring three months of student-led street demonstrations across the country, Radio Television Serbia, long a propaganda bullhorn for President Aleksandar Vucic, had suddenly shifted gears and put protests in Novi Sad atop its news bulletins.
Worse still, at least for the governing party, it reported factually without denouncing the protesters as traitors in the pay of foreign intelligence services or puppets of the opposition, as it has in the past.
President Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party complained in an unusual statement late Saturday about the “scandalous reporting” by the broadcaster, saying it “grossly abused the journalistic profession by siding with politicians who would destroy the constitutional order of the Republic of Serbia.”
Control of the media has been a central pillar of Serbia’s system under Mr. Vucic, allowing him to weather multiple rounds of protests by demonizing and discrediting protesters, and to keep a firm grip on power for more than 12 years.
Many, however, are now asking whether this control is slipping, and with it perhaps the president’s increasingly authoritarian rule.
“This is a small but possibly revolutionary change,” said Jasmina Paunovic, a veteran state prosecutor in Belgrade, the capital. She added that longtime royalists were wavering throughout the system as “they shake off their fear” of losing their state jobs or facing disciplinary action.
She said that many judges and prosecutors she knows, though all ultimately dependent on the state for their careers, now support the students, at least privately. Serbia’s bar association voted on Sunday for lawyers to suspend work for a month in solidarity with students, who have barricaded campuses across the country.
The weekend protests in Novi Sad, held three months after a structural failure at a newly renovated railway station in the city killed 15 people, drew not only students from local universities and Belgrade but also throngs of older people angry over what they see as a system riddled with corruption.
The Nov. 1 collapse of a concrete canopy suspended over the station’s entrances crushed the people below it and triggered the snowballing protest movement, which was driven by a belief that official negligence and graft were responsible for the tragedy. The station was renovated by a consortium of state-owned Chinese companies, and work on the canopy was carried out by a private Serbian contractor that had been promoted by officials.
The recent protests over several weekends represent the biggest outpouring of discontent since street demonstrations in the late 1990s against Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s nationalist leader during the Balkan Wars that followed the collapse of communist Yugoslavia.
Svetlana Bistrovic, 43, a nurse and mother of two, said she had decided to cheer on students blocking a major railway and road bridge in Novi Sad on Saturday after seeing the Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic appear at a basketball game on Friday night wearing a shirt with the words “Students are champions.”
She waved a sign emblazoned with protest slogans and featuring a plastic tennis racket.
That Mr. Djokovic, whose family has in the past been outspoken in backing President Vucic, was siding with protesters, she said, showed that “change is coming in this country.”
But Mr. Vucic shows no sign of giving up. Last week he jettisoned his prime minister, Milos Vucevic, a loyal ally, a former mayor of Novi Sad and chairman of the governing party, known as SNS, leaving the country without a government.
But Mr. Vucic, confident that his party can defeat fractious opposition parties in any new election, given the uneven electoral playing field, has since vowed to go on the offensive against his political opponents and to call a general election if Parliament fails to approve a new government to his liking.
“I will not give anyone this state on a platter,” he told supporters on Saturday. “I will fight, fight, fight.”
Nebojsa Vladisavljevic, a political science professor at the University of Belgrade, described Serbia as a “spin dictatorship,” which, like other post-communist governments in neighboring Hungary and elsewhere, “is less repressive but much more manipulative.”
He said the sudden shift in messaging by the state broadcaster, RTS “is just part of a game to show that there is a bit of fair media coverage.”
And even without state television and radio firmly on the president’s side, he added, Mr. Vucic still controls a battery of potent media weapons, like the private television station Pink, which remains unswervingly loyal. And an array of vitriolic tabloids show no sign of wavering in their support for the president.
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.
Mila Pajic, a university student in Novi Sad active in organizing protests, said she had been portrayed by government-aligned media as “mentally unstable.” She was demonized as anti-Serbian, with Informer publishing a video of her arguing with her boyfriend and asserting that the couple was fighting over clandestine funding from abroad. It accused her of being in cahoots with Croatia.
The tabloid story, she said, “was completely invented” and turned “an ordinary argument between two people in their 20s into a national scandal.”
She said the state broadcaster’s shift to more sympathetic coverage of the protests “is not a huge step forward but a small step in the right direction.”
Mr. Vladisavljevic, the Belgrade political scientist, interpreted the governing party’s denunciation of RTS journalists for their neutral coverage of events in Novi Sad as a “pre-emptive move to keep them in line” and a message to the party’s heavily rural base that “nothing has really changed.”
“They worry that the media might flip. They worry about the military, about the prosecutors, everyone,” he said. “But we are not at a tipping point yet.”
