Battered by weeks of student-led street demonstrations, Serbia’s strongman leader Aleksandar Vucic on Tuesday sacrificed his prime minister in an effort to calm protests that had engulfed towns and cities, posing a major challenge to his decade-long grip on power.
Prime Minister Milos Vucevic, a close ally of President Vucic and nominal leader of their Serbian Progressive Party, said he was stepping down so as “not to further raise tensions in society” — just hours after Mr. Vucic demanded “an urgent and comprehensive reshuffle of the government.”
A master at maneuvering within Serbia’s deeply polarized politics, and between Russia and the West, Mr. Vucic has a long record of throwing allies overboard, at least for a time, and catching fractious opposition parties off balance. Opponents have struggled to challenge him in elections but have jumped on protest movements led by students and others outside party politics.
It is unclear whether the departure of the prime minister will calm, or perhaps even escalate, the nationwide protests, fueled by public anger over the deaths of 15 people in a November structural failure at a newly renovated railway station in the northern city of Novi Sad.
Students, who have barricaded campuses for weeks, gathered on Tuesday outside the governing party’s headquarters in Novi Sad, where unidentified pro-government supporters had beaten up several protesters on Monday evening. The outside wall of the party’s office was covered with graffiti reading “Murderers,” “Thieves” and other insults. Anti-government activists also resumed protests in Nis, a large city in the south.
Mr. Vucic promised on Monday to meet one of the student protesters’ principal demands — the release of contracts and other documents relating to the reconstruction of the Novi Sad railway station, which was carried out by a Chinese company and its subcontractors. On Nov. 1, a concrete canopy suspended over the building’s entrances collapsed, crushing the people below it.
Most of the students’ other initial demands had already been partially met, including the prosecution of people responsible for the disaster and dismissal of ministers who oversaw the reconstruction project, including the minister for construction, transportation and infrastructure, and the trade minister.
As the protests gathered momentum, however, opposition politicians began demanding that Mr. Vucic form a new “transitional government.”
“Vucic is trying to buy time, expecting that the protests will subside,” said Dragomir Andelovic, a political analyst who supports the students. Protests, he added, will continue because the resignation of the prime minister “is just an attempt at a new fraud.”
The Serbian presidency used to be a largely ceremonial position but, since Mr. Vucic assumed office after a 2017 election following a stint as prime minister, it has become Serbia’s dominant power center, and the focus of the opposition’s fury.
The political crisis in Serbia, where President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been working on a complicated deal for a Trump-branded luxury hotel in the center of Belgrade, the capital, poses a dilemma for the new U.S. administration. Under President Biden, the United States sought to woo Mr. Vucic away from Serbia’s traditionally close partnership with Russia and was criticized by opposition politicians for being too soft on the Serbian president.
The Biden administration policy bore some fruit, including the clandestine sale of nearly a billion dollars’ worth of Serbian-made shells and weaponry for use by Ukraine against Russian forces, and Serbia’s endorsement of United Nations resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion.
But Serbia steadfastly resisted pressure to join Western sanctions on Russia and has adopted Russian-style talking points in its response to the protests, with Mr. Vucic this month describing them as an attempt to stage a “color revolution” guided by “foreign instructors” and “agents” from the West. Serbia last week deported five activists from neighboring Croatia, whom it accused of helping Serbian groups involved in the protests.
Serbia applied to join the European Union in 2009, but its alignment with Russia, doubts about its commitment to democracy and other obstacles have stalled its membership.
Some analysts and diplomats say that Russia has been stoking the protests to pressure Mr. Vucic into abandoning his on-off courtship with the West. Serbian war veterans joined a recent street demonstration waving Russian flags.
There have been multiple protests in Serbia against Mr. Vucic in recent years, but the current round has won support beyond opposition party activists and other perennial critics of the government. Among those voicing support or at least sympathy for the protesters have been a trade union representing employees of the state-run broadcasting system, RTS, and the Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic, whose family has in the past been outspoken in it backing President Vucic.
Previous protest rounds — against Covid restrictions, democratic backsliding, gun violence and a big lithium mine — were mostly confined to Belgrade, and they eventually fizzled. But the canopy collapse at Novi Sad and allegations of graft in construction contracts have stirred anger far beyond the capital, becoming the catalyst for wider grievances against highhanded officials, widespread corruption and a media landscape dominated by vitriolic pro-government tabloids and a highly slanted state broadcaster.
Protest marches in Belgrade, Novi Sad and other towns have attracted tens of thousands of people, paralyzing traffic and disrupting business.
The size and persistence of the demonstrations have been compared to unrest in the late 1990s that in 2000 toppled Slobodan Milosevic, the autocratic Serbian leader who had pushed his country into a series of disastrous wars against its neighbors in the disintegrating federal state of Yugoslavia.
