The local elections held today in Mionica, Negotin and Sečanj once again exposed what Serbia has long become: a country where elections are reduced to a battlefield of intimidation, thuggery and lawlessness—regardless of whether the accusations come from the government or the so-called opposition.
Boris Tadić, leader of the SDS and former president of Serbia, lamented on X that the progressives had “attacked” these municipalities with what he described as phalanxes of criminals, threatening citizens, slashing tires of observers, and roaming villages in jeeps.
But in a country where both the ruling elite and yesterday’s leaders helped build the very system they now condemn, such statements ring hollow.
Tadić dramatically declared that “these elections are already not regular,” as if this were some shocking deviation rather than the logical continuation of a political culture shaped for years by impunity, manipulation and disregard for democratic norms.
He went on to nostalgically claim that the last time a Serbian government behaved legally was in 2012—conveniently the final year of his own power—only to accuse the current regime of having “stolen” those very elections by waving bags of fake ballots in front of the Assembly.
Yet this admission exposes the truth: Serbia’s political rot did not begin with Aleksandar Vučić; it was cultivated and normalized long before, by those now pretending to stand on the moral high ground.
Tadić asserts that today’s elections are neither legal nor legitimate because observation missions withdrew due to security threats. True—but Serbia’s electoral collapse is not the result of a single day of violence. It is the product of more than a decade of authoritarian consolidation under Vučić, and years of political decadence before him.
From blatant intimidation to institutionalized fraud, from staged patriotism to the open abuse of state resources, Serbia continues to sink deeper into a system where power is maintained not by votes, but by fear, coercion and manipulation.
And both Vučić’s regime and yesterday’s political guardians bear responsibility for creating a Serbia in which democratic processes have become theatre, and citizens mere spectators to a state captured by organized political force.
Tadić ends his message with a call for strength “with the students and citizens of Mionica, Negotin and Sečanj.” But solidarity means little when the entire political class—past and present—has helped build the very machine that crushes democracy today.
