Lithium, Lies, and the Balkan Strongman Europe Loves

Europe props up Vucic’s autocracy, trading democratic principles for lithium, arms deals, and false “stability,” while Serbia dances to Putin’s tune and strangles its own future.

In Belgrade, the students have been on the streets for more than nine months now¹. They began with candles, chants, and placards, and they are still there—though the air is thicker now, edged with tear gas and the thud of riot police boots. It started with a tragedy in Novi Sad²: a railway station canopy collapsed, killing fifteen people. Corruption, negligence, the same words muttered after every disaster in Serbia, were suddenly amplified by the unyielding voices of the young. At first, they were dismissed as idealists with megaphones. Now, they are treated as enemies of the state.

Aleksandar Vucic, the Serbian president, has resisted them with an iron patience. His strategy is not one of sudden, spectacular suppression, but of a long, grinding attrition. The protests have been met with a repertoire of intimidation familiar to those who lived through the Balkan wars: the deployment of loyalist paramilitaries³, criminal gangs in plain clothes, and the old spectre of the “Red Berets” reassembled to lurk at the edges of demonstrations. These are not accidental tactics; they are part of a deliberate performance, in which dissent is not merely opposed but made to seem dangerous, even treacherous.

The question is why, why such stubborn defiance in the face of a movement that, in its early days, could have been neutralised by compromise? The answer lies beyond Belgrade’s city limits. It lies in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels; in the corporate boardrooms where contracts for Serbian lithium are drawn up; in the conference halls where French fighter jets⁴ are offered to a man whose political pedigree includes serving as Slobodan Milosevic’s information minister during a genocide.

Germany’s Olaf Scholz has courted Vucic over the Jadar mine’s lithium reserves with the desperation of a man chasing a deadline⁵. France’s Emmanuel Macron, with his Rafale jets deal, has elevated the Serbian leader from Balkan autocrat to European client. The EU, in its infinite flexibility of principle, continues to pour aid into Serbia while publicly admonishing Kosovo⁶, the one functioning democracy in the neighbourhood. Vucic, watching carefully, has learnt the lesson: you may trample civil rights at home, undermine⁷ neighbours abroad⁸, and still be feted as a partner, provided you keep the right doors open for European business and the right channels open to Moscow.

For Vucic, the protests are not merely about domestic dissent, they are a test of sovereignty, a stage on which to prove to both his Western suitors and his Kremlin patron that he can hold the line. His rule rests on a careful balance between accommodating Russia’s strategic needs and exploiting the EU’s strategic cowardice. The student movement threatens that balance, not because it is likely to topple him in the short term, but because it reminds the outside world, if only briefly, that Serbia is not the “stability partner” Brussels pretends it is, but a one-man machine for regional destabilisation.

The European powers know this. They know Serbia’s deepening military and intelligence ties with Moscow⁹. They know about the Russian espionage centre in Nis, the Wagner recruitment in Belgrade, the arms purchases from China and Iran. They know Serbia has played a leading role in sabotaging Kosovo’s sovereignty, that it is grooming Bosnian Serb secessionists, that it is quietly reviving the nationalist fantasies which fuelled the 1990s wars. Yet their response has been to give Vucic more, more aid, more military hardware, more diplomatic indulgence.