Now both of these movements need to prove that they can lead their people better than the previous regime or the backlash will be enormous.
Ngl joining the EuroZone (what Magyar did) is precisely the myopic decision that allows future fascist to rise to power. Joining EuroZone only makes sense iff EU becomes a federation.
Thing is there is a sort of regression to the mean. Even if you free all the media and do some great progressive moves, if people's lives don't get easier and future shocks make your living worse, blaming past governments only helps to a point.
Hence why going to EZ for Hungary is so worrying. Nothing helped fascist thrive more in Greece than austerity. With Drahma, you have some control over fiscal policies. Not so much with Euro. You'll do what Troika says, or else!
Yes, it is a problem. But barring an actual centralized EU government this is what we have right now, a federation that is 'loosely coupled'. It has advantages, but as you correctly note also some massive disadvantages.
Joining the Eurozone makes sense if your country does most of the business in euros. Which Hungary does. Czechia and I guess Poland do too and should have switched long time ago. Worth mentioning also that all of them legally committed to that on accession to the EU back in 2004; of the new EU members from CE, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the Baltic countries adopted the Euro and I don't identify a fascist streak there.
do you think, if there was real oppression people could even vote democratically and change their government?
I think you don't know what is oppression then.
(not downplaying how bad Vucic had been to Serbia, but the fact that people replaced him without violence and democratically means something still was in place)
There are certainly different levels of oppression and autocracy.
Here it was designed and made to look like a democracy, but it really required a 70% turnout and 50%+ of people voting against the ruling party for them to accept defeat, especially as there are still large vote thefts going on (to the order of 5-10% of the entire voting population). Basically, anything less than 50% would have put the country in turmoil and violence — again.
As a tidbit, we've got 6.4M registered voters (18+) in a country of 6.5M people. There are a few explanations about how that works, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
> especially as there are still large vote thefts going on
Funny, because if you even suggest there *might* be cheating in US elections, especially with the farce that is mail-in voting and groups actively fighting to NOT check IDs, people get really upset.
The reason people get frustrated with the things you brought up are because they don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, and ignores actually impactful voter fraud. It's like complaining about a paper cut while getting mauled by a tiger.
Anything that an individual person does with a ballot is mostly not impactful Barring a handful of generally-not-important local elections, an individual casting one or two or three ballots (or filling out someone else's ballot on their behalf) doesn't actually move the needle.
What does move the needle, are mass voter role purges dome based on demographic. These are done by the government, generally by the party in power in a given location in a bid to stay in power despite their unpopularity.
As a bonus point, when citizens get the voter registration invalidated without being told, then when they go to vote they generate a statistic that gets parroted by internet sycophants talking about evidence that voter fraud is rampant!
That's the excuse often given. If only it were so!
If your voter role purge is >90% living citizens whose only "violation" is living in a zip code unlikely to vote for the party in power, then that's disenfranchisement.
Including a token dead person on your voter roll purge, does not make it a purge of dead people.
We have extremely low voter turnout overall and a truly negligible amount of provable election fraud, even after years of investigations from an administration that has a vested interest in proving the 2020 election was fraudulent.
Why should we enact more barriers to voting to solve a problem that doesn't even exist?
If you investigate these things you'll find only 50 people in all of California illegally registered to vote. Just like checking fares on the the train and posting cops on the hov. When trump investigated he found an extremely negligible amount of fraud.
> Checking ID on election day is more likely to enable election fraud than prevent voter fraud
This could be in the top 3 most hilarious cope I've ever read.
Last time I voted, my "verification" consisted of someone glancing up from a newspaper to look at my signature for 0.25 sec and going "yeah looks good". That's it. No ID, no nothing, all I gave them was a name.
When the ID check to buy a pack of smokes at Safeway is way more stringent than voting, the system is fucked.
It takes more KYC to open a goddamn GMail account.
If only there was any evidence at all. Trump could only find 50 people incorrectly registered to vote in all of California. They still check your registration at the polls too.
There is tons of evidence! When Texas does its biannual purge of voter registrations from blue zip codes, all the people who silently had their right to vote revoked generate statistics when they try to cast a ballot.
Kinda like how you can point to an essentially arbitrarily large quantity of illegal immigrants if you first manufacture them by revoking their ability to be here legally, without informing them.
> do you think, if there was real oppression people could even vote democratically and change their government?
Sorry, they get no bonus point for accepting the elections’ results. It’s the bare minimum if they want to pretend to be in a democracy. It does not make them any less oppressive. See also Orban and the PiS.
Now they have some time in the opposition to build something credible to get back into power if they really want it.
Definitely. As someone who's been living in Serbia for quite some time, I'd say Vučić's regime has been relatively mild. I haven't personally heard of people being jailed, killed, or even forced out of the country for political reasons. Turkey is much more repressive, while Russia, Belarus, and North Korea are in a completely different league.
What is the point of this "no true Scotsman" comment, exactly? To defend Vucic? Or to say that what the people managed to do wasn't very hard because they managed to do it?
Ronald Reagan in 1987, while speaking to the Bicentennial of the Constitution Essay Competition winners, discussed reading the constitutions of other nations like the Soviet Union and noting their stated guarantees of freedom, emphasizing that the true difference lies in the concept of "We the People".
I always took this as warning that "We the People", can also be the cause of why those freedoms are taken. Cue the US electing convicted rapists and Brazil almost electing an US agent...
Bad take. These kind of hybrid regimes or "electoral autocracies" are kind of the flavor du jour of modern attempts towards authoritarian governments. You take control democratically, and then build a system where you control as much of the apparatus of democracy as possible: you change rules or laws to ensure opposition parties cannot gain an advantage in elections; you take control of or ally with the owners of media institutions to push your agenda; you concentrate powers under offices that are easy to control, such as an executive or judicial body. When these regimes topple, as with Orban earlier this year and Vucic now, it is because the autocrats overestimated their control. Orban didn't think it was possible for the usually fractious opposition to get the votes to defeat him, but Magyar managed it. Pressure from outside helps, too; when Orban took power, he did so as a center-right figure aligned with the largest political block in the EU (and got support from many of his counterparts, especially Merkel). By the time he lost power, much of Europe had distanced itself from Hungary and that pressure was being felt internally.
I think the important takeaway here is not that "a lack of violence means that there wasn't real oppression," but rather that modern autocrats are trying to execute a playbook whereby they retain the appearance of democracy to legitimize their rule as a mandate from the people while stacking the deck as much in their favor as possible. Indeed, trying to violently retain power kind of defeats the purpose of the charade; by relinquishing control, the autocrats can treat defeat as a temporary setback, not a permanent loss. Expect this playbook to evolve as more hybrid regimes fall out of favor.
Indeed, the democracy -> dictatorship pathway is well documented by now. The reverse is a lot harder, though it is good to see that when the people show they are not going to be cowed that there is a way back out. It takes a lot of bravery though and the people of Serbia are to be commended for what they have done here. Vucic is already laying the ground for discrediting them so the fight isn't over yet (watch is 'concession speech' to see how).
This is extremely good news. I know quite a few people in Serbia and elsewhere of Serbian extraction and this is going to make them so happy. Hungary showed the way, though in Serbia they were fighting at least as hard.
It is glorious. Moscow backed Vučić and lost anyway, due to their combined track record.
Who will they blame it on this time? Maybe those of us in previously forced "Eastern Bloc" countries can now be allowed to have agency, to leave Moscow's influence if we choose to?
This is the problem for Moscow, now what they have openly asked Washington for help. The entire Moscow imperialist mirage is collapsing. There is no one else to blame now. In fact, forget Moscow, it's not a factor. It's just that none of us can deal with pure corruption and still run a great economy. For one thing, that's why so many super smart Russians escape their own country/low-trust environment.
I have hope that at some point Russia too will begin to understand that the days of empire are behind us and that it is better to create than destroy. Trump is an asshole, no mistake there, but he has done us collectively a huge favor: it's very clear that America is for sale and that we should no longer let the good parts from the past cloud our vision in the present.
I wonder how 'MAGA' would behave if I took them on a walk through the allied cemeteries in France, Belgium or the Netherlands. If they would understand that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought precisely against the same mentality that they have brought back into play.
Those cemeteries look so immaculate they could have been laid yesterday. There is huge respect for the United States, Canada and the countries of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and to some extent even for Russia to have put a stop to the Nazi's. But that does not give a country the right to go and misbehave on the world stage to the degree that the United States has done in recent memory.
What I do not know: how much of this is because of Russian influence in America. That could well have been a much larger factor than we know at the moment, maybe this will come to light at some point in the future and if and when it does I suspect that a reconnection between the USA and its - former? - allies may be closer than we think. But it will first take a lot of introspection for that to happen.
But if you look at the path of Hungary, now maybe Serbia, and hopefully the USA skips all of this quickly... it's just that low-trust, aka corruption, is bad for business.
On this website, I read the most succinct comment I have ever seen on the Internet:
> Trust is efficient.
Eventually, low-trust fails. It feels like we have all be getting dragged into a low-trust environment lately. But, as long as the high-trust option seems possible, we will progress towards it and efficiency, right?
BTW, I did not mean to go around your point regarding the trans-Atlantic alliance, and what so many of us died for. I just didn't want to disturb the thrust of HN.
> I have hope that at some point Russia too will begin to understand that the days of empire are behind us and that it is better to create than destroy.
I don't have that hope but if there is any path to that, it leads through many many coffins.
> how much of this is because of Russian influence in America. That could well have been a much larger factor than we know at the moment
There is some influence but it's not the largest part. It's just the robber barons of the world form natural coalitions and help each other.
No. English is my 2nd language, and even though I started really early and spent plenty of time in English speaking countries I still suffer from the curse of limited idiom. Feel free to correct me at any time. I think in this case it was in part because the people that I know that live here were refugees from the war (kids at the time).
Don’t worry, it’s a pretty common expression used precisely as you did. Haven’t heard it that much in the US in recent times though, which is probably why the parent post complained.
Meanwhile, in Bulgaria there was the presidential election that no one cared about so the turnout is in the %20 and the pro-Russian candidate severely underperformed. It was expected to be %47 vs %30, ended up being in the %30 for both the pro-Russian and the pro-western candidates.
Also the stronghold of Erdogan is crumbling with the collapse of $20B ponzi scheme where all the winners happen to be from Erdogan’s inner circle.
It’s overall a feeling of earth moving in Europe again.
Le Pen is more or less dead politically. The RN is currently twisting itself into knots because they want to use the anti-government protests but are still supposed to be about law and order.
Wait, is that true? I try to ignore the prediction markets as they appear to be very well funded efforts at the tail wagging the dog, but can you provide the links to the biggest positions on this?
Very good news. I thought it was interesting how the EU was more cozy with Vucic. My guess would be that despite this new movement being closer in ideals with what the EU should stand for, they are nervous about the idea of people taking control into their own hands instead of delegating to established parties.
Look this is just a start, but it is great that dissatisfaction that is expressed throughout the Europe, can be expressed in such constructive and clear way in Serbia.
It is not really a party — it's a nomination list by the protest-organising students — and the people really voted against the ruling party.
The idea is for this to enable true democracy to re-appear, and then actual parties would battle it out in the next elections.
I'd say the risk to political stability in Serbia remains, but just like in any functioning democracy, what matters is that there is regular change and politicians understand that they are soon to be replaced (this avoids the levels of corruption that is multiples of base government project costs and actually cost lives).
I hope that everyone reads your comment. This is how far-gone it was in Serbia, and now there is hope of recovery. This is not some USA left/right party discourse, this is recovery from pure corruption. This is what happened in Hungary, where after years of "far-right"[0] control, a center-right party took over with just the promise of competency and far less foreign influence, and everyone cheered.
[0] What ever the hell that means these days, pure kleptocracy that sells xenophobia but is funded by Russia and China?
Great win for democracy. Now the students will
have to show that they can do better than Vucic.
This won't be too hard, but there is an economic
recession in the whole Euro-zone right now.
Overcoming that is a challenge for many countries
right now.
Well, first of all, Serbia is not in the eurozone.
However, also. Whichever news source told you the eurozone was in recession, you should be a bit more sceptical of that news source. It’s just not correct. The eurozone had two short (< 1 year) technical recessions earlier in the decade caused by shocks from Covid and the invasion of Ukraine; beyond those it hasn’t been in recession since the financial crisis.
>but there is an economic recession in the whole Euro-zone
Eurozone growth is about 1% this year and projected to be 1.5% next year. Sluggish but far from a recession. This isn't to nitpick or to ignore real, challenging issues but there's a distorted media view on economic growth in Europe.
And a lot of these anti-democratic movements benefit from this purely vibes based information space politics.
The replacement party isn't any better though. It will not change anything in Serbia. Just like Hungary which might look like it's changed , but it's not. The political layer isn't remotely controlling those countries. Powerful institutions are. And they are not chosen.
I'm Hungarian and there have been countless positive changes in only half a year. The people in charge are also way more competent than the last lot who all got promoted based on loyalty.
* Billions in EU funds restored
* State funded propaganda shut down
* Tax cuts for low earners
* European prosecutor's office joined and anti corruption agency established with real power, crooks already going to jail
The same is true of the US, up to a point. Should the democrats win in the midterms, they’re largely defined by being not their opponents. They’re still corporatist and unwilling to take meaningful stands or make significant changes.
There are many political factions in Serbia. Some (mainly older people) still harbor negative feelings towards EU and NATO countries for bombing them in 1999 and recognizing Kosovo as an independent state. So an alliance with Russia seems like a better option to them even though it's an economic dead end.
Wrong war(s), Serbia (proper) suffered zero damage during those wars. The only time Serbia (proper) suffered any real damage was ~4 years later, in 1999, in response to attacking Kosovo.
Ah yes, how could I forget about all the ethnic cleansing that happened in Serbia during the 90s. You (Serbia) were literally unharmed until 1999. Not even like a a single grenade that flew past the border into Serbia, or like a small scale terrorist attack.
Serbs in other countries were fighting their own separatist wars. You (Serbia) didn't do any of that fighting. You dealt with sanctions, hyperinflation and a refugee crisis, which sure wasn't easy, but you saw no death, you experienced no grief, the village you grew up in wasn't burned to the ground, the city you live in wasn't under siege.
The only time you (Serbia) experienced anything war-like was in 1999, and even that was like a two months long air campaign with no boots on the ground.
“Serbia (proper)” is doing a lot of work in your argument. I was talking about Serbs, not a line on a map.
Around 200,000 Serbs were driven out of Krajina in a few days during Operation Storm in 1995. Roughly a quarter of the ~100,000 dead in Bosnia were Serbs (Bosnian Book of the Dead). By 1996 Serbia was hosting over 600,000 refugees, one of the largest refugee populations in Europe at the time. Those people didn’t “deal with a refugee crisis”. They were the refugee crisis, and today they’re our neighbours, in-laws and classmates. Plenty of families in Serbia also buried conscripts who were sent to Croatia in 1991.
1999 also wasn’t just “a two-month air campaign” to the people who lived through it. It lasted 78 days, killed around 500 civilians by Human Rights Watch’s count, and was followed by another ~200,000 Serbs and Roma leaving Kosovo.
None of this cancels what was done to Bosniaks and Croats, much of it in Serbia’s name, by a regime many of us protested against. Bosniaks suffered and I’m not disputing that. But “you saw no death, you experienced no grief” is simply untrue, and saying it doesn’t make anyone else’s grief count for more.
Also saying Serbia has not experienced anything war-like but the NATO bombing, is delusional. You do seem to forget how many Serbian people died in WWI and WWI.
Whoever taught you this at such a young age, is helping spread and water the seed that is not letting anyone heal from the shit that was organized in the 1990s. I wish you well.
I looked into Vučić's past and came across a phenomenon known as 'war tourism,' specifically the alleged 'Sarajevo Safari.' Supposedly, foreigners—mostly from Italy—paid large sums of money to travel to Sarajevo and shoot at civilians and children with sniper rifles. What evidence is there that he was involved, aside from that one video where it looks like he’s carrying a camera tripod rather than a sniper rifle
1. Were there snipers targeting civilians from the top of the hill south of Sarajevo? Undeniable, that was never debatable.
2. Was he present at that hill around the time snipers were shooting at civilians? Yes, he never denied being present there and that's where that one grainy video originates.
3. Were there rich foreigners on that hill doing "war tourism" or were all of the civilians shot by Serb forces exclusively? Up for debate, enough evidence to start some investigations, highly unlikely that those investigations will be able to say anything conclusive over 3 decades after.
4. Did he play any role in making those deals with rich foreigners? No evidence of that that's more concrete than putting him at the right place at roughly the right time.
So, him saying that he heard any sort of foreign language around him would be the evidence of #3, but him legitimately not witnessing any such thing (and everyone believing him) wouldn't really be the evidence of the contrary, as #3 could've happened before or (more likely) after his time on that hill.
What a beautiful day. 14 years of oppression, absolute power, no media freedom, and the most ridiculously botted internet down the drain.
Same thing happened in Hungary earlier this year, after 16 years of Orbán (and FWIW, the two are / were "good friends").
Interesting times.
Now both of these movements need to prove that they can lead their people better than the previous regime or the backlash will be enormous.
Ngl joining the EuroZone (what Magyar did) is precisely the myopic decision that allows future fascist to rise to power. Joining EuroZone only makes sense iff EU becomes a federation.
They'd have to work hard to do worse, at the same time the old guard is going to try to sabotage this for sure.
Thing is there is a sort of regression to the mean. Even if you free all the media and do some great progressive moves, if people's lives don't get easier and future shocks make your living worse, blaming past governments only helps to a point.
Hence why going to EZ for Hungary is so worrying. Nothing helped fascist thrive more in Greece than austerity. With Drahma, you have some control over fiscal policies. Not so much with Euro. You'll do what Troika says, or else!
Yes, it is a problem. But barring an actual centralized EU government this is what we have right now, a federation that is 'loosely coupled'. It has advantages, but as you correctly note also some massive disadvantages.
Joining the Eurozone makes sense if your country does most of the business in euros. Which Hungary does. Czechia and I guess Poland do too and should have switched long time ago. Worth mentioning also that all of them legally committed to that on accession to the EU back in 2004; of the new EU members from CE, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the Baltic countries adopted the Euro and I don't identify a fascist streak there.
do you think, if there was real oppression people could even vote democratically and change their government?
I think you don't know what is oppression then.
(not downplaying how bad Vucic had been to Serbia, but the fact that people replaced him without violence and democratically means something still was in place)
There are certainly different levels of oppression and autocracy.
Here it was designed and made to look like a democracy, but it really required a 70% turnout and 50%+ of people voting against the ruling party for them to accept defeat, especially as there are still large vote thefts going on (to the order of 5-10% of the entire voting population). Basically, anything less than 50% would have put the country in turmoil and violence — again.
As a tidbit, we've got 6.4M registered voters (18+) in a country of 6.5M people. There are a few explanations about how that works, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
Dead people not removed from the registry?
Congratulations! Huge step this one.
> especially as there are still large vote thefts going on
Funny, because if you even suggest there *might* be cheating in US elections, especially with the farce that is mail-in voting and groups actively fighting to NOT check IDs, people get really upset.
The reason people get frustrated with the things you brought up are because they don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, and ignores actually impactful voter fraud. It's like complaining about a paper cut while getting mauled by a tiger.
Anything that an individual person does with a ballot is mostly not impactful Barring a handful of generally-not-important local elections, an individual casting one or two or three ballots (or filling out someone else's ballot on their behalf) doesn't actually move the needle.
What does move the needle, are mass voter role purges dome based on demographic. These are done by the government, generally by the party in power in a given location in a bid to stay in power despite their unpopularity.
As a bonus point, when citizens get the voter registration invalidated without being told, then when they go to vote they generate a statistic that gets parroted by internet sycophants talking about evidence that voter fraud is rampant!
> mass voter role purges dome based on demographic
Like dead people? We wouldn't want to disenfranchise them.
That's the excuse often given. If only it were so!
If your voter role purge is >90% living citizens whose only "violation" is living in a zip code unlikely to vote for the party in power, then that's disenfranchisement.
Including a token dead person on your voter roll purge, does not make it a purge of dead people.
Oh wow normal voter roll maintenance and nothing to do with fraud, crazy!
We have extremely low voter turnout overall and a truly negligible amount of provable election fraud, even after years of investigations from an administration that has a vested interest in proving the 2020 election was fraudulent.
Why should we enact more barriers to voting to solve a problem that doesn't even exist?
> to solve a problem that doesn't even exist
Delusion.
One cannot assert something doesn't exist on the basis that it's never verified.
It's like saying there's no fare-evaders on the train if you never check tickets.
No one cheats in the diamond lane either, because they're never pulled over and ticketed.
If you investigate these things you'll find only 50 people in all of California illegally registered to vote. Just like checking fares on the the train and posting cops on the hov. When trump investigated he found an extremely negligible amount of fraud.
I would love to see any kind of study that has numbers on this, please share if you have one!
The administration has had years and the entire federal legal apparatus at its disposal to prove anything untoward occurred in 2020. Where is that?
Voter registration already requires an ID.
Checking ID on election day is more likely to enable election fraud than prevent voter fraud.
> Checking ID on election day is more likely to enable election fraud than prevent voter fraud
This could be in the top 3 most hilarious cope I've ever read.
Last time I voted, my "verification" consisted of someone glancing up from a newspaper to look at my signature for 0.25 sec and going "yeah looks good". That's it. No ID, no nothing, all I gave them was a name.
When the ID check to buy a pack of smokes at Safeway is way more stringent than voting, the system is fucked.
It takes more KYC to open a goddamn GMail account.
If only there was any evidence at all. Trump could only find 50 people incorrectly registered to vote in all of California. They still check your registration at the polls too.
There is tons of evidence! When Texas does its biannual purge of voter registrations from blue zip codes, all the people who silently had their right to vote revoked generate statistics when they try to cast a ballot.
Kinda like how you can point to an essentially arbitrarily large quantity of illegal immigrants if you first manufacture them by revoking their ability to be here legally, without informing them.
It's just maintenance of the voter list
Right exactly!
It's not hacking, it's just surprise maintenance of someone else's computer.
It's not fraud, it's just maintenance of someone else's money into my bank account.
Yeah not really at all the same thing okay
> do you think, if there was real oppression people could even vote democratically and change their government?
Sorry, they get no bonus point for accepting the elections’ results. It’s the bare minimum if they want to pretend to be in a democracy. It does not make them any less oppressive. See also Orban and the PiS.
Now they have some time in the opposition to build something credible to get back into power if they really want it.
"not downplaying how bad Vucic had been to Serbia".
But you are, though.
Definitely. As someone who's been living in Serbia for quite some time, I'd say Vučić's regime has been relatively mild. I haven't personally heard of people being jailed, killed, or even forced out of the country for political reasons. Turkey is much more repressive, while Russia, Belarus, and North Korea are in a completely different league.
Oppression is not binary. And modern forms make it extremely difficult to hold the oppressive governments accountable.
There's a spectrum between the Netherlands and North Korea.
NL should not be at the top of the range though, Switzerland would be a better choice for that position.
Would you also say for example, that there was no suppression in the GDR?
Fallacy of relative privation.
What is the point of this "no true Scotsman" comment, exactly? To defend Vucic? Or to say that what the people managed to do wasn't very hard because they managed to do it?
If you question was honest, most likely - a dislike for semantic bleaching.
Also, some (not me), have survived regimes like Tito, Assad or Saddam, they definitely would have different perspective on word oppression.
(A thing to get us on the same ground, lets call him extremely corrupt, very few will dispute that)
Clearly the question is honest. As for that response ... not so much.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ...
It's actually a fallacy of relative privation.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Relativ...
That is not a good analysis. Both North Korea and Russia claim to be democratic countries - see the name "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".
Ronald Reagan in 1987, while speaking to the Bicentennial of the Constitution Essay Competition winners, discussed reading the constitutions of other nations like the Soviet Union and noting their stated guarantees of freedom, emphasizing that the true difference lies in the concept of "We the People".
I always took this as warning that "We the People", can also be the cause of why those freedoms are taken. Cue the US electing convicted rapists and Brazil almost electing an US agent...
That’s an absurd take. The true difference lies in how things actually work in reality, not in a phrase written on a piece of paper somewhere.
You could replace the constitution of North Korea with that of the United States without a single thing changing in practice.
You managed to completely misunderstand both Ronald Reagan and my comment in one single take. Amazing.
Bad take. These kind of hybrid regimes or "electoral autocracies" are kind of the flavor du jour of modern attempts towards authoritarian governments. You take control democratically, and then build a system where you control as much of the apparatus of democracy as possible: you change rules or laws to ensure opposition parties cannot gain an advantage in elections; you take control of or ally with the owners of media institutions to push your agenda; you concentrate powers under offices that are easy to control, such as an executive or judicial body. When these regimes topple, as with Orban earlier this year and Vucic now, it is because the autocrats overestimated their control. Orban didn't think it was possible for the usually fractious opposition to get the votes to defeat him, but Magyar managed it. Pressure from outside helps, too; when Orban took power, he did so as a center-right figure aligned with the largest political block in the EU (and got support from many of his counterparts, especially Merkel). By the time he lost power, much of Europe had distanced itself from Hungary and that pressure was being felt internally.
I think the important takeaway here is not that "a lack of violence means that there wasn't real oppression," but rather that modern autocrats are trying to execute a playbook whereby they retain the appearance of democracy to legitimize their rule as a mandate from the people while stacking the deck as much in their favor as possible. Indeed, trying to violently retain power kind of defeats the purpose of the charade; by relinquishing control, the autocrats can treat defeat as a temporary setback, not a permanent loss. Expect this playbook to evolve as more hybrid regimes fall out of favor.
Indeed, the democracy -> dictatorship pathway is well documented by now. The reverse is a lot harder, though it is good to see that when the people show they are not going to be cowed that there is a way back out. It takes a lot of bravery though and the people of Serbia are to be commended for what they have done here. Vucic is already laying the ground for discrediting them so the fight isn't over yet (watch is 'concession speech' to see how).
This is extremely good news. I know quite a few people in Serbia and elsewhere of Serbian extraction and this is going to make them so happy. Hungary showed the way, though in Serbia they were fighting at least as hard.
It is glorious. Moscow backed Vučić and lost anyway, due to their combined track record.
Who will they blame it on this time? Maybe those of us in previously forced "Eastern Bloc" countries can now be allowed to have agency, to leave Moscow's influence if we choose to?
This is the problem for Moscow, now what they have openly asked Washington for help. The entire Moscow imperialist mirage is collapsing. There is no one else to blame now. In fact, forget Moscow, it's not a factor. It's just that none of us can deal with pure corruption and still run a great economy. For one thing, that's why so many super smart Russians escape their own country/low-trust environment.
I have hope that at some point Russia too will begin to understand that the days of empire are behind us and that it is better to create than destroy. Trump is an asshole, no mistake there, but he has done us collectively a huge favor: it's very clear that America is for sale and that we should no longer let the good parts from the past cloud our vision in the present.
I wonder how 'MAGA' would behave if I took them on a walk through the allied cemeteries in France, Belgium or the Netherlands. If they would understand that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought precisely against the same mentality that they have brought back into play.
Those cemeteries look so immaculate they could have been laid yesterday. There is huge respect for the United States, Canada and the countries of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and to some extent even for Russia to have put a stop to the Nazi's. But that does not give a country the right to go and misbehave on the world stage to the degree that the United States has done in recent memory.
What I do not know: how much of this is because of Russian influence in America. That could well have been a much larger factor than we know at the moment, maybe this will come to light at some point in the future and if and when it does I suspect that a reconnection between the USA and its - former? - allies may be closer than we think. But it will first take a lot of introspection for that to happen.
But if you look at the path of Hungary, now maybe Serbia, and hopefully the USA skips all of this quickly... it's just that low-trust, aka corruption, is bad for business.
On this website, I read the most succinct comment I have ever seen on the Internet:
> Trust is efficient.
Eventually, low-trust fails. It feels like we have all be getting dragged into a low-trust environment lately. But, as long as the high-trust option seems possible, we will progress towards it and efficiency, right?
That's a very nice finding. Keeping that!
BTW, I did not mean to go around your point regarding the trans-Atlantic alliance, and what so many of us died for. I just didn't want to disturb the thrust of HN.
NP at all, mail in your inbox (or spam box :) )
Well, now we have to have a beer or tea, or whatever.
Many hours ago, I had a half-written email to you in my drafts. I have now sent it to you.
> I have hope that at some point Russia too will begin to understand that the days of empire are behind us and that it is better to create than destroy.
I don't have that hope but if there is any path to that, it leads through many many coffins.
> how much of this is because of Russian influence in America. That could well have been a much larger factor than we know at the moment
There is some influence but it's not the largest part. It's just the robber barons of the world form natural coalitions and help each other.
As an aside, I've been seeing "extraction" used more instead of "descent" or "heritage" lately. Is there any reason you adopted that terminology?
Fairly standard UK English.
No. English is my 2nd language, and even though I started really early and spent plenty of time in English speaking countries I still suffer from the curse of limited idiom. Feel free to correct me at any time. I think in this case it was in part because the people that I know that live here were refugees from the war (kids at the time).
Don’t worry, it’s a pretty common expression used precisely as you did. Haven’t heard it that much in the US in recent times though, which is probably why the parent post complained.
Your English is fine.
Finally, time for the cleanup.
This is very welcome news. Well done Serbia!
https://archive.ph/ooC4N
I hope India goes the same way.
Meanwhile, in Bulgaria there was the presidential election that no one cared about so the turnout is in the %20 and the pro-Russian candidate severely underperformed. It was expected to be %47 vs %30, ended up being in the %30 for both the pro-Russian and the pro-western candidates.
Also the stronghold of Erdogan is crumbling with the collapse of $20B ponzi scheme where all the winners happen to be from Erdogan’s inner circle.
It’s overall a feeling of earth moving in Europe again.
Le Pen? AfD?
Le Pen is more or less dead politically. The RN is currently twisting itself into knots because they want to use the anti-government protests but are still supposed to be about law and order.
Le Pen is leading polls and is the polymarket fav by 2-3x.
Oh, she’s leading on a gambling website that just got Sebria and Brazil massively wrong? Well, there we go then, victory assured.
You know who else was polymarket fav? The guy in this news who just lost
Wait, is that true? I try to ignore the prediction markets as they appear to be very well funded efforts at the tail wagging the dog, but can you provide the links to the biggest positions on this?
https://polymarket.com/event/next-prime-minister-of-serbia-2...
Seems true. Was at 70% before
AfD, whose internal emails were leaked for all the world to see who they really are?
What about them?
Gaining ground in the two largest EU countries.
Every movement has a counter movement.
France and Germany aren't Serbia, and Turkey is far from certain still.
Very good news. I thought it was interesting how the EU was more cozy with Vucic. My guess would be that despite this new movement being closer in ideals with what the EU should stand for, they are nervous about the idea of people taking control into their own hands instead of delegating to established parties.
Wonder if something similar will happen in Albania. See Edi Rama go.
Isn’t the student list pro-Russian too? They stated basically that this putin’s ass licking politics will continue
Pobeda! Win!
Look this is just a start, but it is great that dissatisfaction that is expressed throughout the Europe, can be expressed in such constructive and clear way in Serbia.
Is this new party cohesive enough or will it split into infighting?
It is not really a party — it's a nomination list by the protest-organising students — and the people really voted against the ruling party.
The idea is for this to enable true democracy to re-appear, and then actual parties would battle it out in the next elections.
I'd say the risk to political stability in Serbia remains, but just like in any functioning democracy, what matters is that there is regular change and politicians understand that they are soon to be replaced (this avoids the levels of corruption that is multiples of base government project costs and actually cost lives).
I hope that everyone reads your comment. This is how far-gone it was in Serbia, and now there is hope of recovery. This is not some USA left/right party discourse, this is recovery from pure corruption. This is what happened in Hungary, where after years of "far-right"[0] control, a center-right party took over with just the promise of competency and far less foreign influence, and everyone cheered.
[0] What ever the hell that means these days, pure kleptocracy that sells xenophobia but is funded by Russia and China?
You are absolutely right!
Great win for democracy. Now the students will have to show that they can do better than Vucic.
This won't be too hard, but there is an economic recession in the whole Euro-zone right now. Overcoming that is a challenge for many countries right now.
Well, first of all, Serbia is not in the eurozone.
However, also. Whichever news source told you the eurozone was in recession, you should be a bit more sceptical of that news source. It’s just not correct. The eurozone had two short (< 1 year) technical recessions earlier in the decade caused by shocks from Covid and the invasion of Ukraine; beyond those it hasn’t been in recession since the financial crisis.
Serbia is not the Euro-zone. It's not even in the EU.
Most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans see decent economic growth currently.
>but there is an economic recession in the whole Euro-zone
Eurozone growth is about 1% this year and projected to be 1.5% next year. Sluggish but far from a recession. This isn't to nitpick or to ignore real, challenging issues but there's a distorted media view on economic growth in Europe.
And a lot of these anti-democratic movements benefit from this purely vibes based information space politics.
Good. The world needs fewer fascists and nationalists in power.
Dont look at Brazil's election thats happening right now.
Edit: Hopefully this ages poorly. It's a tight race
It did age poorly. Lula won the election
https://www.reuters.com/live/brazil-election-live-lula-bolso...
By any means necessary.
The replacement party isn't any better though. It will not change anything in Serbia. Just like Hungary which might look like it's changed , but it's not. The political layer isn't remotely controlling those countries. Powerful institutions are. And they are not chosen.
I'm Hungarian and there have been countless positive changes in only half a year. The people in charge are also way more competent than the last lot who all got promoted based on loyalty.
* Billions in EU funds restored
* State funded propaganda shut down
* Tax cuts for low earners
* European prosecutor's office joined and anti corruption agency established with real power, crooks already going to jail
* Forint 363 to the euro compared to 400 in 2023
* Homophobic law repealed
* Term limit introduced for MPs and PMs
* Rail overhaul plan
* No more kowtowing to Russia
The same is true of the US, up to a point. Should the democrats win in the midterms, they’re largely defined by being not their opponents. They’re still corporatist and unwilling to take meaningful stands or make significant changes.
(1) Nothing changes over night. (Unless you want explosions; I surely dont)
(2) The most important thing is that power was handed over peacefully. New guy, new team, new ideas and approaches.
Can you describe in detail what these powerful institutions are, and how they manage to hold back change?
I’m genuinely curious, what makes you think Hungary hasn’t changed?
Saying Hungary hasn't changed has to be the biggest lie I've seen in a while.
I love it when democracy punches a fascist in the mouth.
This is great! I never understood the Serbian view of allying with a loser country like Russia. I assume it was all corruption and oligarchs.
There are many political factions in Serbia. Some (mainly older people) still harbor negative feelings towards EU and NATO countries for bombing them in 1999 and recognizing Kosovo as an independent state. So an alliance with Russia seems like a better option to them even though it's an economic dead end.
Nato bombed Serbia in 1999. Russia is anti nato. Result unsurprising.
Hopefully, wounds are healing, and more productive friends can be found.
Serbia and Russia go way back, way before 20th century
Why did Nato bomb Serbia in 1999?
Serbia and Croatia attacked Bosnia. All three parties are former yougoslavia. It's complicated.
Wrong war(s), Serbia (proper) suffered zero damage during those wars. The only time Serbia (proper) suffered any real damage was ~4 years later, in 1999, in response to attacking Kosovo.
We (Serbia) were ethnically cleansed as well, that does not count, right?
Ah yes, how could I forget about all the ethnic cleansing that happened in Serbia during the 90s. You (Serbia) were literally unharmed until 1999. Not even like a a single grenade that flew past the border into Serbia, or like a small scale terrorist attack.
Serbs in other countries were fighting their own separatist wars. You (Serbia) didn't do any of that fighting. You dealt with sanctions, hyperinflation and a refugee crisis, which sure wasn't easy, but you saw no death, you experienced no grief, the village you grew up in wasn't burned to the ground, the city you live in wasn't under siege.
The only time you (Serbia) experienced anything war-like was in 1999, and even that was like a two months long air campaign with no boots on the ground.
“Serbia (proper)” is doing a lot of work in your argument. I was talking about Serbs, not a line on a map.
Around 200,000 Serbs were driven out of Krajina in a few days during Operation Storm in 1995. Roughly a quarter of the ~100,000 dead in Bosnia were Serbs (Bosnian Book of the Dead). By 1996 Serbia was hosting over 600,000 refugees, one of the largest refugee populations in Europe at the time. Those people didn’t “deal with a refugee crisis”. They were the refugee crisis, and today they’re our neighbours, in-laws and classmates. Plenty of families in Serbia also buried conscripts who were sent to Croatia in 1991.
1999 also wasn’t just “a two-month air campaign” to the people who lived through it. It lasted 78 days, killed around 500 civilians by Human Rights Watch’s count, and was followed by another ~200,000 Serbs and Roma leaving Kosovo.
None of this cancels what was done to Bosniaks and Croats, much of it in Serbia’s name, by a regime many of us protested against. Bosniaks suffered and I’m not disputing that. But “you saw no death, you experienced no grief” is simply untrue, and saying it doesn’t make anyone else’s grief count for more.
Also saying Serbia has not experienced anything war-like but the NATO bombing, is delusional. You do seem to forget how many Serbian people died in WWI and WWI.
Whoever taught you this at such a young age, is helping spread and water the seed that is not letting anyone heal from the shit that was organized in the 1990s. I wish you well.
Genocide
At least back then they could have avoided being bombed by not participating in a genocide. But they did & got bombed.
Do you really think we had a choice? Do you also think the whole thing wasn’t planned between all of the countries involved?
They share many cultural elements.
neither side can truly say they are free and clear of vast amounts of foreign monies.
A great day for Serbia indeed.
I looked into Vučić's past and came across a phenomenon known as 'war tourism,' specifically the alleged 'Sarajevo Safari.' Supposedly, foreigners—mostly from Italy—paid large sums of money to travel to Sarajevo and shoot at civilians and children with sniper rifles. What evidence is there that he was involved, aside from that one video where it looks like he’s carrying a camera tripod rather than a sniper rifle
This requires a lot of unpacking.
1. Were there snipers targeting civilians from the top of the hill south of Sarajevo? Undeniable, that was never debatable.
2. Was he present at that hill around the time snipers were shooting at civilians? Yes, he never denied being present there and that's where that one grainy video originates.
3. Were there rich foreigners on that hill doing "war tourism" or were all of the civilians shot by Serb forces exclusively? Up for debate, enough evidence to start some investigations, highly unlikely that those investigations will be able to say anything conclusive over 3 decades after.
4. Did he play any role in making those deals with rich foreigners? No evidence of that that's more concrete than putting him at the right place at roughly the right time.
So, him saying that he heard any sort of foreign language around him would be the evidence of #3, but him legitimately not witnessing any such thing (and everyone believing him) wouldn't really be the evidence of the contrary, as #3 could've happened before or (more likely) after his time on that hill.
I feel like the lack of a question mark betrays the intent of the comment.