In March 2025, the pro-democracy mass protests in Serbia reached their peak so far. With slogans like „Corruption kills!“ and „Pump it!“ („Pumpaj!“), the protesters demanded anti-corruption measures and a transparent investigation into the Novi Sad disaster, where a train station canopy collapsed in November 2024, killing 16 people. The democratic protest, which permeates all segments of Serbian society, also manifests itself as a rebellion of the Serbian language against the regime’s fabricated counter-reality—as a creative struggle for truth and transparency. What linguistic and performative strategies do the protesters employ? What distorted propaganda mechanisms do those in power reproduce? In this investigative-analytical commentary written in March as part of a broader analysis, theater scholar Ivana Ječmenica describes the Serbian mass mobilization as a sociopolitical phenomenon—and in doing so, she herself employs performative (writing) techniques.
Language is where everything has started (where else, after all?!). We have been committed to the persistent banalisation of political and general vocabulary where violence and semantic perversion got a permanent residence.
The president and his proteges linguistically made most of the opposition members into the “hooligans”, “thieves” and alike, but no institution did any step in persecuting them (how is that?!). Aligned with the “journalists” from the broadcasters with municipal or national frequency and related media, they called people “mob”, addressing citizens, especially those obviously of a lower class, with an informal pronoun, without the basic respect for their age at least, whereas that very statesman used to sit on a small chair in front of one American president.
The next blatant example of discursive distortion is embodied in the penultimate prime minister and current President of the National Assembly of Serbia, who, with the assistance of media that manipulate our linguistic and therefore socio-political imagination, seeks to entrench the whole nåtion into Spinozian “inadequate understanding” in order to celebrate itself as an “economic tiger”, especially given the vast amount of lithium already booked for Rio Tinto and its transnational gang. In doing so, she positions us anachronistically on the brink of an industrial revolution, while much of the world is miles away thinking posthumanism, ecofeminism, (queer) Marxism, etc. Interestingly, although a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, she has miserably performed her gender identity, doing nothing to improve the community’s status in Serbia, staging instead a performance of populistic obedience to the Boss (Srb. šef), as the entire cabinet unconstitutionally and servilely addresses the president. With her wife and child, she ultimately symbolizes the paradox of “unequal equality” in Serbian society.
Serbian politics as a mirror of the international tendency towards selective application of democratic norms
Building on the reckless approach to the expropriation of mineral resources, this narrative has been troublingly applied to the population itself. In a clear display of rhetorical violence, a member of the SPP and the National Assembly of Serbia confidently claimed that children under eighteen belong to the state, without facing any repercussions to date. This assertion mirrors the broader international disregard for democratic values, as seen when Herr Scholz visited Serbia to finalize the lithium deal, promising to attend EXPO ’27. However, according to the Serbian students, this venture might EXPOde before his arrival, since they are charging people’s batteries without extracting a single gram of lithium. Most importantly, since I addressed environmental issues, the ecological protests in Serbia, some of which were massive, were a general rehearsal for the people’s protest capacities and skills. This again reinforces the notion that no protest is ever in vain; it strengthens the agency of every citizen and vaccinates us against the fear of the system and apathy before TINA (There Is No Alternative).
March 7, 2025: Students cheer on the demonstration from the balcony. “Everyone to the plenums!” reads the poster. Photo: Philine Bickhardt.
One alternative is already manifesting in the linguistic turn with simple calling things by their names, particularly institutions, their functions and the duties of their employees, in order to deploy nouns like constitution, law, public prosecutor’s office etc. from the abstract and bring them into a performative utterance with illocutionary force.
Not-naming as one means to capacitate linguistic protest
Meantime, as some prominent Serbian public figures suggested long ago to boycott the president’s name and position (Srb. nepomenik – the one not to be mentioned), it seems to be an intelligent students‘ strategy to do the same considering his lack of authority. With his extremely frequent public addresses, he used to appear from each of our fridges (nåtional joke), but now he is even disappearing from the vocabulary. His famous response to each problematic misconduct “So, what?!?” got a reaction: “So, prison!”. The last former prime minister’s command to educational workers “to perform” and “full stop!”, was jointly refused with dignity, despite the state’s reliance on their hired hooligans and similar individuals, often functionally and literally illiterate, who managed to mix up Cyrillic letters in the act of graffiti pressure performed on the wall of a gymnasium in Novi Sad (Đaci u škole! / Pupils, back to schools!). Thus, the word ćaci (instead of đaci; Cyr. Ћаци / ђаци, Eng. pupils) became a collective noun in singular (pl. ćaciji) for president’s students and similarly intellectually capacitated followers (a placard read: The transition from đ to ć is loyalisation, as a reference to the phonetic change known as palatalisation and the fraction of loyalists within SPP of „somewhat extreme views”). Yet another neologism is ćacnuti – a verb, to steal, deceive, embezzle, but in a clumsy way, accompanied with a ćaci tongue twister.
Absurdly enough, this all happened in well-timed accordance with the same former prime minister’s conflation of two eminent Serbian poets in his speech, which he shortly after managed to close with a melodramatic announcement of resignation. On the other hand, students wrote a blockade Cyrillic alphabet encompassing all the values they are standing for, and proclaimed the The Student Edict with provisions on freedom, the state, justice, youth, dignity, knowledge, solidarity, and the future during one of the protests in Niš (Naissus), inspired by the Roman Emperor Constantin who was born there.
Imagining otherwise: Memes as a new arena of bottom-up expression
President’s mantra (although I tried not to mention him with such frequency, this proves his deep infiltration in our realities) insists there will be no revolution, but how could he know?! Even if it is not televised, the empowering feeling is experienced thanks to brave experiments in imagining otherwise and staying connected with the possible, against the heartless world. It is certainly a rEVOLution that even managed to bring Serbian cities and villages into a linguistic solidarity, making all dialects into the new public normal.
“Unfortunately”, a thuggish dialect and its articulated content coming from the president of parliament, whom a former Serbian president once described as “semi-oral”, remain beyond comparison absolutely unacceptable. Most recently, his remark was again proven accurate, when she managed to ludicrously distort the proverb “He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword” (Srb. „Ko se mača lati, od mača će i poginuti”), sparking a wave of memes. As Limor Shifman (2013) notes, memes, as a “new arena of bottom-up expression, can blend pop culture, politics, and participation in unexpected ways.” Their humorous effects foster engagement through simplicity, inviting people to playfully co-analyse situational politics. A particularly glorious example features 19th-century language reformer Vuk Karadžić pleading with the president of the parliament not to write as she speaks, twisting his famous maxim: “Write as you speak, read as it is written.”
Now we perform the language, we pump, batter, and stew
After all, the political and media establishment is struggling to ideologically position students and co-protesters, permanently making changes as bad students of poststructuralism caught in the aporia of their own signifiers. Contrarily, one student in blockade did a comprehensive self-framing in Olja Bećković’s TV show „Impression of the week”, pointing out that the word university stands for community, faculty for opportunity, professors are public teachers, and to study means deepening interests and exploring – we are all students in the lifelong learning, and now we perform the language, we pump, batter, and stew.
March 7, 2025, 11:52 am: The protesters in front of the Rectorate of the University of Belgrade hold 16 minutes of silence in memory of the disaster in Novi Sad. Photo: Philine Bickhardt.
Drawing on my background in theatre, the insightful, awakening and witty placards conjure agitprop, Brecht’s epic and Piscator’s proletarian theatre, historical examples of the powerful convergence between theatrical form and political protest. Their messages are concise and direct, with explicit political content, employing a mode of storytelling rooted in minimalistic staging and symbolic props, with the principal aim of provoking audience’s participation and reaction. Some of them are based on classic dramas, from Sofokle, Shakespeare, Branislav Nušić, Petar Kočić, to a slightly modified Beckett: Waiting for Metro, since the subway still belongs to the realm of sci-fi in Belgrade. Further central motifs are based on the iconic lines from films, TV series, comics and cartoons, establishing a continuum between their childhood experiences and our own. They are usually repurposed into parodies that embed the political crisis into shared cultural memories making all our identities being seen and relevant. I doubt that Gen Z reads Zagor, but I certainly have, which is why I was amazed with their playful engagement with the name of state prosecutor Zagorka D., widely criticised for failing to fulfill her institutional duties, reworking the comic’s line into: Don’t embarrass me, Zagorka! Meanwhile, KRIK’s investigative journalists revealed that the capo of a criminal organisation, according to the intercepted Sky communications, was codenamed “Oscar”, and all signs refers to the Serbian president himself. This was inspiring for a placard: Aaaaand the Oscar goes to… jail!
On the other hand, while it may seem improbable in today’s world, the Nobel Peace Prize could be awarded to the Serbian students, given their Gandhian commitment to peaceful resistance.
State-compliant performances in Pionirski Park
Another language in which the protesters are proficient is the medium of film, both in terms of content and editing. Students from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts (FDU) are at the forefront, producing short films that document and comment on the protests. Recently, two cinematography students infiltrated the camp at Pionirski Park and produced a documentary capturing everyday life there of “students who want to learn”. Namely, the president set up a crowd of so-called students, though many of them were highly suspicious in multiple ways. It later became clear they were being paid for this painfully bad performance of loyalty to the state and complaining about their colleagues and professors in blockades, who, they claimed, were denying them their guaranteed right to study, and a chance to articulate their position as representatives of the majority of the student’s body in Serbia. This is de facto contradicting the very way students’ plenum, rooted in direct democracy, is functioning at the blocked universities. Even worse, it was depressing to see what some Serbian citizens are willing to do. As they were fenced in and guarded by police, many joked that this was the world’s only human zoo. On the other hand, without any joke, students from the Faculty of Biology and several ecological organisations (e.g., Eko straža) emphasize the site’s cultural, archaeological, and biological significance, where protected plant species need immediate conservation.
Fighting the regime’s fabricated counter-reality
Such bizarreness, including the poor attempts to stage attacks by the “student loafers” and their supporters, were fought back linguistically, exemplified by the renaming of Pionirski Park to „Ćaciland” that was even temporary recognized by Google Maps, which paved the way for a subsequent masterful spin in form of accusing the students in blockade of neo-nazistic tendencies to target and endanger a specific group of “honourable and hard-working Serbian citizens”. This in fact serves the ongoing state’s reproduction of fascism-affine rhetoric: us versus them and the spectacular regime’s fabrication of a counter-reality, their own versions of practices regularly performed in detoxicated Serbia, such as counter-protests and counter long-distance marches, set to culminate in the announcement of the president’s demands (12th of April).
Meanwhile, in the face of a long-standing deficiency in actual journalists, students became the newest socio-political investigators. By creating independent formats of fact-based reporting and promoting citizen journalism, they are reshaping the media landscape, and empowering citizens to permanently question the meaning of “your right to know everything” as says the famous slogan of the Serbian public radio and TV broadcaster (RTS). This even echoes Orwell’s (1945) assertion that “f large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech”, and this is why a group of students has effectively assumed the role of counter-media, establishing their own News Bulletin (FDU Dnevnik), since the RTS broadcasts disinformation, propaganda, and implements the governmental brainwashing of the whole nåtion. One particularly absurd case involved a plainclothes police officer, attacked by a colleague who had mistaken him for a protester. The protesting citizens helped him, but later, in a direct speech from the hospital, he modified the event into a tragicomic performance of confusion and unreserved gratitude to the president, whose working title could be “Do not trust your own eyes”. Every episode of the students’ Dnevnik ends in hope that it will be the last one, meaning that their demands have finally been met.
March 15, 2025: Belgrade. Photo: Philine Bickhardt.
Moreover, the resistance of language can be expressed through its intonation, as heard on Radio Belgrade, but also in the adaptation of theological knowledge, as demonstrated by Bishop Grigorije from Düsseldorf, who made a “blasphemous” comparison of St. Sava, the founder of Serbian Orthodox Church and school patron saint, with a young rebel who ran away from home (court) to a church, becoming a monk and co-founding later on the state, law, legislation, educational system, and medicine. St. Sava’s father told him after many years: “Son, be my father!”, which was a subtle message of the bishop to all parents of the children in blockades. This has infuriated the church officials and pro-regime media.
“This attack on democracy, it’s also a linguistic attack”
From a linguistic angle, it is curious that the symbol of the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, a wolf named Vučko, coincidentally resembles the name of the Serbian president, has inspired yet another poignant placard: The only Vučko I trust is the one from Sarajevo, who in general stands for regionally shared memories, values and solidarity. For all those willing to see, patronal politics stands naked, just like the president and his network of global enablers. It appears that we are even destabilizing the very Occidental notion of Balkanisation. Furthermore, according to Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University, “o understand this authoritarian moment here and across the world, this attack on democracy, it’s also a linguistic attack,” and therefore protecting democracy means protecting language itself. Serbian ruling politicians have already shifted from calling the students in the blockade good, but politically manipulated kids to labeling them as fascists, satanists, and terrorists in yet another attempt to attune us to something banally evil, to engineer our consent, entirely dismissive of Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonistics, which students’ plena consistently embody through the negotiation of their own decisions and differences.
Reclaiming a dignified media space in Serbia
Language is used deliberately to evoke specific images, as if there was no other flow of information or interpretation but the governmental. Rectors of certain universities have been publicly branded as anti-Serbian criminals who ought to be arrested – in a country where the president of parliament and the director of the tabloid media (now rebranded as Desinformer by the protesters, who recently demonstrated in front of their building, demanding the revocation of their broadcasting license in Belgrade) employ identical violent rhetoric and speech behavior. This is just one among countless examples of such radioactive alliances. But all of us, alongside actual journalists, are practicing a kind of political aikido, parodying these authoritarian discourses in our collective effort to reclaim a dignified media space in Serbia. The regime wants to win without any intention to touch upon the civilizing power of respectful, constructive, and honest conversation. Consistent with their already mentioned narrative of students-led “terrorisation” of Serbian citizens, the state in fact exerted sonic terror during the protest on March 15th in Belgrade. This act is still plausibly denied by the regime, but people have never before been so resolute in rejecting such a scenario as yet another conditio humana (relevant data are currently being gathered and documented on the platform zvuk labs).
Make democracy great (again?!): Crisis as a chance for solidarity and ethics
Returning to the university, where it all began, its purpose in a democracy is to teach facts and ethics, and they need to be protected worldwide. This is especially important considering that regimes with fascist undertones, as is well-researched, do not have many differences, as creativity is not their way. American and German deportations of talkative, and therefore socio-politically unwanted foreign citizens were reflected in Serbia a few days ago, when an Italian pianist who had played on the blocked bridges in Niš and a Belgrade-based medical doctor of Croatian origin were ordered to leave the country in a short time, under banal yet frightening pretexts. This is the right moment to say: EU, don’t be Ćaci! (ask Google translate, hahaha!). We need more practices of unsettling and Socratic courage to make democracy great (again?!), to reframe the current global crisis as a chance for new possibilities of solidarity and ethics. What we need now are brave spaces rather than safe ones. Universities, as Zahra Mousawy proposed during the Academic Freedom Week 2025 at Humboldt University, should be „houses of dreams.” One of my own would be to see the flags of Serbian universities raised at universities in Berlin. After all, Ukrainian flags were everywhere, and many still are.
February 2, 2025: This is a variation on a well-known saying: “If someone comes at you with punches, answer with the blockade.” Photo: Philine Bickhardt.
The freshly attained adult life in Serbian society, the realisation of the intricate tie between language and power (without necessary prior engagement with Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, etc.), and the desire for intellectual liberty, assures me that no new “evil wizard of Oz will lead us on again”, and that, in line with the vision of the singer-songwriter from Novi Sad, Đorđe Balašević, we will indeed “live freely.” As the Serbian theatre director Zlatko Paković wrote on his social media: “The student protest has returned to the Serbian language its lost power to express truth. There is no greater achievement than that.”
The end is when they say it is the end. Children’s politics of the future.
Featured image: A poster showing the Blockade Alphabet of Students during the protests in Belgrade. Photo: Iva Tanacković.
Translation of the Alphabet:
