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Serbian police have recently escalated their use of force to dismantle street blockades and curb large-scale protests denouncing the government and demanding snap parliamentary elections. On July 3, authorities stated that Serbian police detained 79 demonstrators during nationwide rallies in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš, and Novi Pazar. For the past eight months, students, opposition groups, and civil society organizations have organized persistent anti-corruption demonstrations.

Protests first erupted in the Balkan state following the November 2024 collapse of a Novi Sad railway station canopy that claimed 16 lives, an event that was widely seen as emblematic of years of government negligence. Since June 28, tens of thousands of students and supporters have erected barricades across major urban intersections, staging silent blockades at 11:52 AM  CET—the exact time of day when the Novi Sad railway station canopy collapsed.

Police have repeatedly cleared these encampments. According to witnesses, riot police last week attacked participants with baton charges that left four students hospitalized, leading O’Flaherty to condemn the “excessive use of force” and “arbitrary detentions.”

President Aleksandar Vučić, who remains in power until 2027, has framed the demonstrations as foreign‑backed “terror” plots, praising security forces and rejecting calls for early elections.

As EU scrutiny intensifies over demonstrated human rights violations, the student‑led uprising underscores a broader struggle over democratic governance. Ongoing repression may hinder Serbia’s EU accession bid that formally began in 2012, and reaffirm calls—domestic and international—for electoral reform and institutional accountability.

From JURIST, July 5. Used with permission.

Photo: VOA via Wikimedia Commons

But the conference, hosted by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs & Combating Antisemitism, revealed a systemic alliance between Netanyahu’s Revisionist Zionism and the neo-fascist right. Even Anti-Defamation League leader Jonathan Greenblatt (whose organization faced criticism over its exoneration of Elon Musk’s Inauguration Day Nazi salute as an “awkward” gesture) and the increasingly Islamophobic French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy boycotted the event in protest of the prominent place given to far-right figures. To his credit, British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis also cancelled.

Jordan Bardella, president of the French National Rally party, gave a keynote address at the confab, in which he blamed rising anti-Semitism in Europe on migration, and more specifically Muslim migration, saying: “Islamism is the totalitarianism of the 21st century.” This formulation (and especially use of the article “the”), of course, seeks to dismiss the threat still posed by the totalitarianism of the 20th century—fascism.

Panels had predictable names like “How Progressivism Fell Captive to Antisemitism” and “How Radical Islam Fuels Antisemitism in the West.”

Also on hand was Marion Maréchal, grand-daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Rally’s predecessor party the National Front—and a notorious Holocaust revisionist. This of course comes as Marine Le Pen, the old man’s daughter and (alarmingly) frontrunner in the 2027 French presidential race, has been barred from running upon her conviction on charges of embezzling EU funds for her campaign. (Yet another case of a European country taking pre-emptive legal action to prevent a far-right authoritarian from coming to power, which the United States so dramatically failed to do last year.) Unless she prevails on appeal, Bardella is likely to take her place as the National Rally candidate.

Also prominently featured was David Friedman, US ambassador to Israel during Trump’s first term. Asked by the moderator about Trump’s plan to remove Palestinians from Gaza, Friedman said: “I love it! I love it. And I think it’s doable.”

Other figures from the European far right attended from the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Hungary. Most telling was the appearance by Milorad Dodik, president of the Bosnian Serb Republic—just after a Bosnian court requested an international arrest warrant for him over his separatist policies and defying orders of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia’s central government.

During the conference, Dodik spoke out defiantly against the warrant, telling reporters: “The Muslims from Sarajevo, they want to punish me because I came here to Israel, supporting Israel. They are misusing the judiciary and the prosecutor’s office…”

True to fascistic form, Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli demonized internal dissent to the conference, calling Israel’s center-left Haaretz newspaper a “beacon of lies and anti-Zionist propaganda,” adding that “Haaretz and others like them do not represent the Jewish people.”

Even former ADL head Abe Foxman, for whom criticism of Israel has been heretofore virtually verboten, said: “I don’t think it is appropriate to have representatives of far-right parties in Europe coming to Jerusalem to meet with the Jewish community and together develop a strategy to fight anti-Semitism when they are part and parcel of the problem of anti-Semitism.” (Reuters, NBC, The Media Line, ToI)

In an attempt to appease criticism of the conference, President Isaac Herzog offered a compromise—a private meeting with world Jewish leaders at his home the night before the main event, without the far-right figures. Fortunately, this failed to mollify the boycotters. (ToI)

Is it necessary to point out the multiple converging ironies here? The Islamophobic anti-immigrant invective spewed forth by Bardella perfectly mirrors that employed against Jews in Western Europe and the US yestercentury. Friedman’s enthusiasm for forced relocation of the Palestinians has obvious echoes in what was inflicted on the European Jews in World War II and its prelude. And have we really already forgotten how Serb “ethnic cleansing,” forced internment and massacre of the Bosnian Muslims in the war of the 1990s was at the time assailed as redolent of the Holocaust?

Dodik presumably didn’t even return to Bosnia from Israel before arriving in Moscow to seek Putin’s shelter from the arrest warrant against him in his own country. (This was reported by Radio Free Europe, which the Trump regime is now conveniently seeking to shut down.)

And Netanyahu himself immediately after the conference flew to Budapest to meet with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, darling of Putin, Trump and the re-emergent forces of international fascism (yes). Orban hosted Bibi over the protests of both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which urged that the Hungarian leader have his guest arrested, in compliance with the warrant against him issued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza. (DW)

Image via frgdr Blog. Hebrew lettering in background spells names of places in Europe where Jews were exterminated.

Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

Production by Chris Rywalt

We ask listeners to support us at one of our three tiers via Patreon: Become a Basic Supporter for just $1 per weekly podcast ($5 per month), or a Special Supporter for $2 per podcast ($10 per month), or a Major Rant Enabler for $5 per podcast ($25 per month). We now have 68 paid subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 69!

Image: Chris Rywalt/CounterVortex, after “Rendezvous” by British cartoonist David Low, 1939

Despite the resignations of Prime Minister Miloš Vučević and other cabinet ministers, students launched the new protest, demanding the publication of documents relating to the November 2024 disaster, and a budget increase for higher education. Protesters have also been demanding the resignation of President Aleksandar Vučić.

In a meeting at Sremska Mitrovica, Vučić, who has been holding counter-rallies in his support, said that the student demands were already met, calling the protests a “failed color revolution.” Vučić added that there would be no special elections, but that at least half of the cabinet ministers would be replaced.

On Nov. 1, at least 14 people were killed after the roof above the entrance of a recently renovated railway station collapsed in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city. The disaster sparked widespread protests, with accusations of corruption directed at the city mayor and the central government.

Serbia has been facing anti-government protests for over a year now. In December 2023, protesters rallied across the country against the results of controversial general and local elections. The current protests mark the most important political deadlock in the country since the demonstrations that resulted in the resignation of Slobodan Milošević in 2000. In a parallel to Milošević, Vučić’s rule has been marked by accusations of authoritarianism, ties to the criminal underworld, and widespread corruption.

From JURIST, Feb. 16. Used with permission.

Photo of January Belgrade protest: Emilija Knezevic via Wikimedia Commons

Photo: Melting Pot Europa

The protests mobilized after Vučić’s government signed an agreement with the European Commission last month calling for multinational mineral giant Rio Tinto to move ahead with the Jadar Valley lithium project in the west of the country. The pact comes under the rubric of the European Green Deal, with the lithium to be used in batteries for electric vehicles. But local farmers are opposing it on environmental grounds, fearing contamination of their lands and waters, and have won broad popular support. (Balkan Green Energy News, Balkan Insight, Reuters, Al Jazeera)

See our last reports on the global struggle for lithium, and anti-mining resistance in the Balkans.

Photo: Balkan Green Energy News

The attack was the second to occur in Transnistria in less than a month. The region was similarly hit with a drone strike on March 17, causing a fire and resulting in damage to military equipment. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Pridnestrovian Moldovan Republic, as the breakaway government is called, condemned the March strike as a terrorist attack. At the time, Moldova’s Bureau of Reintegration Policy stated that Ukraine was not involved in the incident.

The largely Russian-speaking Transnistria enclave has been supported by Russia since it broke away in the 1990s. The enclave hosts approximately 1,500 Russian troops.

From Jurist, Aoril 7. Used with permission.

Image: Wikipedia

Photo: US Navy via Wikimedia Commons

But pro-Russian Moldovan lawmakers assailed the move—as did the Russian Foreign Ministry, whose spokesperson Maria Zakharova snarkily suggested that Aurescu is an “artificial construct.” Zakharova claimed that Moldovan is a distinct and older form of Romanian, which is now “officially preserved only in Transnistria,” the breakaway region of Moldova hosting Russian troops. (PRI, Romania Insider, RFE/RL)

Moldova swapped hands between Romania and Russia for centuries, before winning independence from the USSR in 1991, consolidated in a popular referendum in 1994. In recent years, an initiative has emerged in Romania to promote annexation of Moldova, led by a parliamentary group called “Friends of the Union.” (Black Sea)

Image: Nicolas Raymond via Flcikr