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When tens of thousands of protesters blocked three key bridges across the Danube River, paralyzing Serbia\u2019s second-biggest city this weekend, the Balkan country\u2019s beleaguered governing party issued a stern warning \u2014 not to the protesters but to the state-controlled broadcasting service for reporting on them.<\/p>\n
After mostly ignoring three months of student-led street demonstrations across the country, Radio Television Serbia, long a propaganda bullhorn for President Aleksandar Vucic, had suddenly shifted gears and put protests in Novi Sad atop its news bulletins.<\/p>\n
Worse still, at least for the governing party, it reported factually without denouncing the protesters as traitors in the pay of foreign intelligence services or puppets of the opposition, as it has in the past.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
President Vucic\u2019s Serbian Progressive Party complained in an unusual statement late Saturday about the \u201cscandalous reporting\u201d by the broadcaster, saying it \u201cgrossly abused the journalistic profession by siding with politicians who would destroy the constitutional order of the Republic of Serbia.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Control of the media has been a central pillar of Serbia\u2019s system under Mr. Vucic, allowing him to weather multiple rounds of protests by demonizing and discrediting protesters, and to keep a firm grip on power for more than 12 years.<\/p>\n
Many, however, are now asking whether this control is slipping, and with it perhaps the president\u2019s increasingly authoritarian rule.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a small but possibly revolutionary change,\u201d said Jasmina Paunovic, a veteran state prosecutor in Belgrade, the capital. She added that longtime loyalists were wavering throughout the system as \u201cthey shake off their fear\u201d of losing their state jobs or facing disciplinary action.<\/p>\n
She said that many judges and prosecutors she knows, though all ultimately dependent on the state for their careers, now support the students, at least privately. Serbia\u2019s bar association voted on Sunday for lawyers to suspend work for a month in solidarity with students, who have barricaded campuses across the country.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The weekend protests in Novi Sad, held three months after a structural failure at a newly renovated railway station in the city killed 15 people, drew not only students from local universities and Belgrade but also throngs of older people angry over what they see as a system riddled with corruption.<\/p>\n
The Nov. 1 collapse of a concrete canopy suspended over the station\u2019s entrances crushed the people below it and triggered the snowballing protest movement, which was driven by a belief that official negligence and graft were responsible for the tragedy. The station was renovated by a consortium of state-owned Chinese companies, and work on the canopy was carried out by a private Serbian contractor that had been promoted by officials.<\/p>\n
The recent protests over several weekends represent the biggest outpouring of discontent since street demonstrations in the late 1990s against Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia\u2019s nationalist leader during the Balkan Wars that followed the collapse of communist Yugoslavia.<\/p>\n
Svetlana Bistrovic, 43, a nurse and mother of two, said she had decided to cheer on students blocking a major railway and road bridge in Novi Sad on Saturday after seeing the Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic appear at a basketball game on Friday night wearing a shirt with the words \u201cStudents are champions.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
She waved a sign emblazoned with protest slogans and featuring a plastic tennis racket.<\/p>\n
That Mr. Djokovic, whose family has in the past been outspoken in backing President Vucic, was siding with protesters, she said, showed that \u201cchange is coming in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n