June 2025.
As part of the program Regional Initiative for combating disinformation “Western Balkans Combatting disinformation Center: Exposing malicious influences through fact-checking and Analytical Journalism“, the International and Security Affairs Centre (ISAC) presents an analysis of fake news and disinformation narratives.
Threats to Serbia on a sacred day – They want blood, fear, and chaos on Vidovdan: Brnabić exposes the plans of the blockaders
https://informer.rs/politika/vesti/1028169/brnavic-bloakderi-vidovdan
On one of the most significant dates in Serbia’s modern history – June 28th – a large civic protest was held in Belgrade. A student movement called on citizens to join a mass protest on Vidovdan, a holiday that undeniably holds great importance in national history and collective memory, with a specific demand for the calling of snap parliamentary elections.
The protest movement in Serbia is currently undergoing a phase of evolution and political articulation of previous demands, now unified under a clear overarching call for early elections – a request that Serbian authorities are openly rejecting at this time. The Vidovdan protest reportedly gathered around 140,000 people, according to various estimates, confirming the continued high level of mobilization among the opposition-minded public seeking political change in Serbia.
In the period leading up to the protest, representatives of the Serbian authorities carried out an intensive campaign aimed at stigmatizing the student movement and discouraging citizens from attending the gathering. Pro-government media outlets promoted claims about the violent nature of the planned event, with the aim of intimidating both the organizers and the public, and sowing uncertainty regarding the Vidovdan civic protest. Illustrative examples include articles published by the country’s most widely read pro-government tabloid, Informer, such as the one titled “Threats to Serbia on a sacred day – They want blood, fear, and chaos on Vidovdan: Brnabić exposes the plans of the blockaders”
Informer quotes the Speaker of the National Assembly, Ana Brnabić, who stated that “the gathering planned by the blockaders for Vidovdan represents everything opposite to what Vidovdan truly stands for – namely, the opposite of unity, solidarity, peace, reconciliation, and a victorious Serbia.” It was further added that “the blockaders planned bloodshed for Vidovdan, and that in the document previously published by the students who are blocking universities, it is written that not only the citizens of Serbia will be afraid of them.”
The Speaker of the National Assembly made claims—without providing any evidence—that the alleged plan involved “not only complete isolation of the country… but also the expulsion of all foreign investors, leaving hundreds of thousands of families in this country without basic material conditions.” Informer’s editors interpreted these supposed plans, which unsurprisingly never materialized, as the true ideology and philosophy of the so-called “blockaders”—a label that government officials and pro-regime media aggressively promote in their effort to stigmatize students who are legitimately fighting for political change.
In other articles, Informer’s authors compared the students’ so-called “ultimate demand” for snap elections, issued ahead of the Vidovdan protest on June 28, with actual ultimatums issued by foreign actors that Serbia faced during the 20th century. These comparisons were accompanied by extremely controversial assertions, such as the claim that the students “aligned themselves with the greatest enemies of Serbia… shoulder to shoulder with Hitler and NATO.”
President Aleksandar Vučić also made multiple public “predictions,” allegedly knowing in advance the exact timeframe in which incidents and violence would occur during the protest.
However, during the large civic protest on June 28, none of the actions or initiatives aggressively speculated upon by pro-government media in the preceding days actually occurred. The majority of citizens peacefully dispersed after the gathering, while a much smaller group became involved in confrontations with the police. It remains unclear how exactly the incidents broke out in different locations, but according to numerous human rights organizations, law enforcement used excessive force and arrested a large number of citizens and students. This triggered a new wave of blockades in Belgrade during the week following the Vidovdan protest.
Author: Igor Mirosavljević
