The Brooklyn Rail

When students, farmers on tractors, and anti-authoritarian demonstrators filled the center of Belgrade, Serbia on March 15, autocratic President Aleksandar Vučić described it as a “large protest with enormous negative energy toward the authorities.” He also said, hopefully, “citizens do not want color revolutions,” using the term the Kremlin used to refer to popular uprisings in the former Soviet territories of Georgia (the Rose Revolution in 2003), Ukraine (the Orange Revolution in 2004), and Kyrgyzstan (the Tulip Revolution in 2005), and going back to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (the non-color Bulldozer Revolution in 2000 that overthrew the autocratic, kleptocratic regime of Slobodan Milošević—remember Otpor!), that were all mounted to establish Western-style liberal democracies.

Something extraordinary is again happening in the Balkans, with students leading these massive protests that the Vučić government doesn’t dare attack directly. But he is attacking universities with threats of firings, withholding of salaries, and assaults on student protestors.¹ In a guest essay in the Opinion pages of the New York Times on May 12, scholar Filip Balunović of the University of Belgrade wrote that “the protestors are doing it their own way—without leaders, without hierarchies, through plenums and strictly horizontal decision-making. Equal and united in solidarity, they are changing Serbia and setting an example for the world to follow.”

Indeed, and the US Left badly needs such an example. What does it mean to have a robust pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian movement? There are also important lessons to be learned from Poland, where public demonstrations helped oust the authoritarian-nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party in the 2023 election. The current daily decentralized protests with different aims that are happening all over the US are vital and necessary, but eventually there has to be a concentrated response that is big enough to threaten the regime in power and give left-of-center politicians cover to stand up and push back.

Democrats in the US are in disarray. The coalition that Bobby Kennedy was trying to put together in 1968 before he was assassinated has been pulled apart by bad-faith actions by the Democratic party and a cultural shift in America toward the Right. To rebuild that coalition, there has to be a popular movement in the other direction. The surprise opposition victory in Poland in 2023 happened because they heeded the call: Don’t let the pro-democracy coalition fracture.

The battle is both cultural and political. The anti-democratic forces are on the move, and they are enfolded within corruption on a monumental scale.

President Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., traveled to Belgrade three days after the mass protest there on March 15 to work on a Trump-branded luxury hotel complex planned by his father and his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner. Don Jr. met with President Vučić to show his solidarity with the embattled president. The protestors had caused the Serbian Prime Minister to resign, which brought down the governing party and forced Vučić to form a new government or call new parliamentary elections later this year. If Vučić is ultimately forced to step down, the Trump family deal would be imperiled.

Don Jr.’s “Conflict of Interest Tour” of Serbia was arranged by President Trump’s former senior adviser for data and digital operations and campaign manager, Brad Parscale, who was accused of mishandling funds meant for the Trump campaign, and was involuntarily committed to a hospital by police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 2020, after his wife told them he was suicidal, hit her, and racked and loaded a handgun during an argument.

The terms of the Trump deal in Belgrade were laid out by Eric Lipton in the Times:

Mr. Vucic’s government signed an agreement last May with Affinity Global Development, a company set up by Mr. Kushner. The company plans to invest $500 million to build a 175-room Trump hotel with 1,500 luxury apartments and other amenities at the former defense ministry site in Belgrade.

“We are thrilled to expand our presence into Europe,” Eric Trump, another of President Trump’s sons, said in January, when the inclusion of a Trump International Hotel to the project was first publicly announced. Eric Trump is the lead family member running its real estate company.

But Donald Trump Jr. is also an executive vice president at Trump Organization, which operates the family’s hotels, golf courses and other assets, and is helping with planning for the Serbian hotel project.²

The Belgrade project was planned to be built on the site of the damaged General Staff headquarters for the army of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that was bombed by NATO forces in 1999 to stop Serbia from attacking Kosovo. A number of protests have been held at the site, opposing its demolition of history for the benefit of the Trump family. Other Trump deals that involve foreign governments include a $2 billion commitment from the United Arab Emirates to the Trump’s cryptocurrency company and more real-estate projects in Qatar and Oman, in addition to all the AI deals in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.

The Trump development scheme in Belgrade screeched to a halt when Serbian prosecutors announced on May 14 that a document releasing the building site from being designated a historic site and protected as “cultural property” had been forged by the acting director of the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments. The acting director was installed five months ago by President Vučić. The fate of what was to be the first Trump-branded development in Europe now seems uncertain. But President Vučić immediately pronounced Trumpishly, “There was not any kind of forgery and we will discuss it with everybody.”³