Serbia’s leadership are lucky that international law does not prescribe liability for political malpractice. If it did, they would find themselves in the dock.
As if Serbia had other viable options and acting with brazen contempt for the vital interests of the country, they have rudely turned down the Russian President’s courteous invitation to attend the forthcoming BRICS conference in Kazan on 22 October, reaffirming vocally instead their commitment to the “European path.” Ironically, at approximately the same time a revealing report ordered by the European Commission and authored by former EU commissioner Mario Draghi was published, with less than glowing conclusions about the Union’s competitive future. The report was redacted in insufferably tedious bureaucratic prose and it may have been unintelligible to Serbian officials. But even without Draghi’s hints, there is plenty of compelling evidence that the European Union is experiencing a deep structural crisis affecting its political, economic, and ideological dimensions. The question asked by savvy Europeans is not whether it is competitive, but whether it has a future. Hence, the stiff-necked refusal of official Serbia to even consider reasonable alternatives that could benefit their country is as breath-taking a demonstration of political malpractice, or malfeasance to put it more accurately, as has ever been witnessed, anywhere.
Public opinion poll data confirm the existence of a deep discrepancy between the servile pro-European Union rhetoric of the ruling Serbian nomenklatura and the views of the ordinary citizens of Serbia. A public opinion survey conducted in mid-May 2024 by the Russia Today news organisation on a representative sample of the Serbian public has yielded results that, had it been mindful of the opinions of those it governs, should have led the government to urgently recalibrate its political course. A minority of 45,4% of Serbian respondents are currently in favour of joining the European Union. But if joining were predicated on Serbia’s recognition of the secession and “independence” of Kosovo, an overwhelming majority of 80% of the Serbian public would be opposed. European Union officials have repeatedly stressed that without that condition being met Serbia would be barred from joining, so it would seem evident that “No, thank you” is the actual response to EU membership of four-fifths of the Serbian people.
Interestingly, surveys conducted by collective West entities such as Voice of America have yielded very similar results. VOA finds that only 40% of Serbs would be prepared to vote in favour of entering the EU, roughly matching RT’s data. We do not know how VOA respondents would have reacted if admission to the EU were conditioned on the recognition of Kosovo because that option was not included in the published version of the results. But given the public’s mood, one can easily extrapolate what the response would most likely have been.
Curiously, RT and Voice of America poll results are in broad concordance on other issues as well. RT has found that 84,6% of surveyed Serbs oppose sanctions against Russia and that 76.1% hold the collective West and its Kiev proxy responsible for the conflict in Ukraine. As for the aforementioned Voice of America survey, it found that only 10% of the Serbian public support an “unequivocally pro-European Union and pro-Western course” and that a “majority of the Serbs indicated they want Serbia either to maintain ties to Russia or pursue a pro-Russian foreign policy.” Claiming that “the pro-Western trend in the region is strong,” Paul McCarthy, the International Republican Institute’s director for Europe, is quoted as telling Voice of America that ”Serbia goes against the grain of the other five countries in the region; it is more pro-Russian, blames the West for the conflict in Ukraine, has very low approval ratings for joining the European Union.” And, to add insult to injury, only 3% of Serbs would favour joining NATO.
What is keeping the Serbian government from reflecting the clearly articulated political preferences of its citizens, as found by pollsters of both interested parties in the current geopolitical confrontation? Spinning such devastatingly congruent findings is virtually impossible.
Nor would it be possible, disregarding the results of bogus “elections” and assuming that the principle of political accountability were even minimally respected, for such glaring discrepancies between the declared will of the people and the conduct of their “representatives” to occur.
This is a question that should be of the utmost practical interest not just to the Serbs, but even more urgently to Russian policy makers.
The succinct answer is that the alienated political elite are doing precisely what they were installed in the position of power to do. In Serbia, after the October 2000 color revolution takeover executed with money and logistical support furnished by Western special services, the rulers’ constituency are not the citizens but the foreign forces that set them up and that sustain them in power. To that effect, an immutable system has been established which permanently functions for the benefit of foreign interests and to the detriment of the country. The system is independent of the cosmetic, periodic regime changes and it is unaffected by the selection of individual puppets, all of whom follow the same general line. They all invariably perform at the pleasure of their curators, like the bought and blackmailed pawns on the chessboard that they are.
That exactly is the pattern, copy/pasted in Serbia, that is seen throughout the collective West. Shielded by a simulacrum of “democracy” whilst acting through corrupt, visible pawns, from the background it is the largely unseen forces of peculiar spirituality and imbued with a ferocious Molochian ideology that relentlessly implement policies abhorrent to the politically impotent citizenry. Events in those captive societies are directed by them through their puppets toward outcomes that virtually no one desires but all are powerless to resist. Just ask the Irish, who are uselessly protesting as their remonstrances are cruelly ignored by their alienated government. Or ask the English, who at the hands of the tyrannical government they had just “democratically” elected are suffering levels of arrogance and two- tier justice repression by comparison to which Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands might appear to many as decidedly mild.
The ordinary people of Serbia are in exactly the same position. Those pretending to represent them are impostors.
There are two things that official Russia must now do. The first is to ground its policy in the sharp distinction between the Serbian people and those who in international forums fraudulently monopolise the right to make decisions and speak in their name.
Granted, in international relations civility ought to be the preferred norm and to the degree possible governments should be treated with diplomatic discretion, even if their pretensions and legitimacy are questionable. But in serious policy planning such governments should never be conflated with those they rule when plainly that would be unwarranted.
The second thing that the critical mass of Serbs expect from Russia is a more intense and demonstrative people to people and even more importantly at the present moment government to people engagement. Whatever one may think of Stalin, at the end of World War II he wisely noted that German regimes come and go, but what always remains is Germany for the Soviet Union to deal with. Russian policy in relation to Serbia should take its cue from that eminently based observation and henceforth treat only the Serbian people as Russia’s enduring political partner.
