The West needs embattled Trump ally Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić to succeed

BELGRADE, Serbia — Student-led protests against Aleksandar Vučić, the strongman president who’s ruled Serbia for more than a decade, have convulsed the country for the past nine months.

In the intolerable August heat, they’ve turned violent.

Almost every evening the center of Belgrade, the capital, transforms into a battlefront. On one side are protesters; on the other, black-clad armed police whose numbers have recently been augmented by government supporters.

The clashes between them, horrifying to behold, radiate all the portents of a civil war in a country whose internal politics a century ago provoked the First World War.

The protests shaking Serbia have already echoed across the Atlantic. From Washington to Chicago to San Francisco, members of the Serbian diaspora have organized rallies in solidarity with those demonstrating at home.

President Vučić seemed oddly detached when I saw him a week ago.

Our meeting had already been moved once because he’d spent all night in an emergency room with injured police officers.

Born in 1970 in what was then Yugoslavia — a multiethnic behemoth of a state composed of six republics, including Melania Trump’s native land, Slovenia — Vučić started his political career on the nationalist far right just as the socialist federation was dissolving into ethnic wars.

As information minister in the government of Slobodan Milošević — who would go on to become the first head of state charged with war crimes, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia — Vučić devised the most restrictive press regulations in Europe.

After Milošević’s downfall, he had a change of heart. Expressing contrition for his erstwhile beliefs and his countrymen’s deeds during the Yugoslav wars, in 2008 he co-founded a new centrist party dedicated to making Serbia a member of Europe.

Vučić was Serbia’s prime minister by 2014. Three years later, he was elected president.

Vučić’s skill at cultivating relationships with Western leaders, even as he deepened economic ties with China and strengthened Belgrade’s ancient bond with Russia, made him the envy of his peers in Europe.

He is one of President Trump’s rare European partners, having ignored opposition at home to approve Jared Kushner’s contentious project to develop luxury housing on the site of the former defense-ministry building in Belgrade, destroyed by NATO bombing.

But the master of self-reinvention and survival, the world’s tallest head of state, looked exhausted as he greeted me.

The protesters, he said, were pawns in the hands of Serbia’s foes trying to foment trouble in the country.

Would he name names? No. Revealing their identities would cause even greater problems.

What he could tell me is that every protester is being paid 30 euros a day “just for food.” Now multiply that figure, he said, by the number of people out there and all the days they have been active.

He paused, as if staggered by his own mental calculations. “It’s millions and millions of euros.”

The unrest outside had been sparked by the November collapse of a concrete awning at a railway station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-biggest city, killing 16 people.

The building, renovated recently by a Chinese state-owned company, was inaugurated with great pomp two years before. Its fall became a symbol of corruption in Serbia.

And what began as a quiet vigil across the country for the dead in Novi Sad exploded over time into an uprising against the president. More than 300,000 Serbians protested in Belgrade in March — the largest-ever demonstration in the city’s history.

It would be inaccurate and unfair, however, to suggest Vučić was unresponsive. One minister was arrested (before being cleared), and two ministers and the prime minister were made to resign.

Initially, Vučić himself described the protesters as “well-intentioned” and instructed authorities not to use disproportionate force in dealing with angry crowds.

But his concessions did nothing to pacify the students. They burned down Vučić’s party office in Novi Sad this month. They now want the president’s resignation and early elections.

Vučić, more than anything else, appeared baffled. What makes him stand out in the Balkans are his achievements, not the ills imputed to him.

He has bequeathed to Serbia for the past 12 years what the Balkans have seldom known: stability and prosperity.

Between 2003 and 2014, the Serbian economy was highly volatile. Under Vučić, though inflation has surged in recent months, unemployment is at a record low, public debt has been reduced, and foreign-investment flows are strong.

As Vučić listed his accomplishments, I was reminded of Lord Lugard, Nigeria’s governor-general from 1914 to 1919, who said of his restive subjects: “Their very discontent is a measure of their progress.”

Had Serbia remained the economic basket case Vučić inherited, it would have been easier to control. It is the glimpse of success Vučić delivered that has bred the impatient anger against him.

Those who remember the hardships of the past are more temperate.

“War destroyed our lives,” Jelena Denić, a 65-year-old owner of a small canteen in Belgrade, told me. “These 10 years are the first time we felt stable and secure. If these protests get out of hand, I am again afraid of losing what we have built here.”

Vučić has a responsibility to his citizens to stop that from happening. Whether he does this through force or concession is up to him.

But it is a mistake on the part of Westerners making vague pleas for action against Vučić to assume what comes after him will be an improvement on him.

Vučić’s opposition is leaderless after nearly a year because it is a medley of extremists and idealists, ultranationalists and nationalists. It has none of Vučić’s strengths but all the vices.

The West must, if only to avoid being sucked in by this crisis spiraling out of control and singeing the region, use its leverage with Serbia to urge Vučić and the legitimate protesters to enter a dialogue.

Equally important is to recognize the demand for the president’s resignation under the threat of violence is not a democratic expression of dissatisfaction.

It is antidemocratic blackmail.

Kapil Komireddi is the author of “Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India.”