A Timely Lesson in How Power Can Backfire During the Pandemic

(Bloomberg) -- Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic was on top of the world last month as his jubilant allies popped champagne and danced to a brass band after a landslide election victory. Now he’s finding that wielding absolute power during the coronavirus crisis is a double-edged sword.

While his one-man approach to running the Balkan country made him seemingly unassailable, it has now made him the lightning rod for public anger. The most violent protests since he took power six years ago have erupted across the country after a spike in Covid-19 infections prompted him to implement another lockdown.

The swift reversal is a timely lesson in leadership during the pandemic. From Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has staked his credibility and sought to frame himself as a global leader in the crisis, to Vladimir Putin, whose approval ratings are at an all-time low in Russia, the virus is ensuring that those who take credit for everything positive also face backlash for not only failures, but even heavy handed victories.

“The pandemic has jeopardized both illiberal and liberal regimes worldwide,” said Vuk Vuksanovic, an international relations researcher at the London School of Economic’s foreign policy think tank. “But in countries with one dominant politician, all the successes will be owned by one man, and all the failures.”

Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party won a constitutional majority in a June 21 vote, and the 50-year-old made sure the credit was all his.

After quelling Serbia’s outbreak of the virus by imposing some of Europe’s strictest lockdown measures, opinion polls showed him with more support than late wartime leader Slobodan Milosevic, who once employed Vucic as his information minister.

Vucic’s confidence was so high that he campaigned for his party, drawing complaints that he violated the constitution because the president should have nothing to do with a parliamentary ballot. He also dominated coverage on state media, prompting the main opposition parties to refrain from fielding candidates in a vote they said was unfair.

The celebrations started going sour rapidly. Just days after the election, tennis world No. 1 Novak Djokovic initially tested positive for Covid-19 after an exhibition tour in the Balkans. It raised questions over Serbia’s efforts to keep the disease under control.

Then a spike in new cases prompted Vucic to announce a plan to reimpose a strict Friday-to-Monday curfew in Belgrade. After previously banning people from traveling between cities and going outside at night and on weekends, his new proposal triggered outrage over his singular grip on power.

Thousands of people took to the streets, and riot police fired tear gas after a group of rock-throwing protesters stormed the parliament building in Belgrade. More than a hundred officers and dozens of protesters were injured in clashes that raged over two days and spread from the capital to other cities.

Vucic responded by backtracking on the curfew, and his government banned large gatherings in Belgrade. But it was too late. While the lockdown plan was an initial trigger, the rallies morphed into a wider platform for anti-Vucic sentiment, and by Thursday, thousands-strong crowds gathered peacefully in multiple cities, calling for him to resign.

“A significant part of Serbia is unhappy with Vucic,” said Zarko Puhovski, a political-science professor at the University of Zagreb.

With his party’s crushing majority in parliament and a fractured opposition, Vucic’s position is as safe as similarly placed politicians including Putin, Xi, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.

Vucic vowed to quell the unrest, which he blamed on “criminal hooliganism” and possible foreign meddling. But his governing style has also hemmed him in, with a need to avoid angering a broad range of supporters without giving his opponents ammunition for criticism.

“He’s on the throne,” Vuksanovic at the LSE said. “But the throne has become very hot these days.”

That’s nowhere more evident than in discussions over Kosovo, which seceded from Serbia in 2008, almost a decade after they fought the last war in the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia.

Serbia must mend ties with Kosovo to join the European Union, Vucic’s biggest foreign policy goal since he took power—first as prime minister—in 2014. But doing so requires that Serbia renounce territorial claims on its neighbor, an unthinkable step for nationalists and the powerful Serbian Orthodox Church, which owns churches and monasteries in the ethnic-Albanian majority state.

Talks that broke down in 2018 were initially scheduled to restart Sunday, but they were postponed after Vucic spoke with Kosovar Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti on a video call with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron.

Days after protesters in Belgrade had chanted “Kosovo is the heart of Serbia,” Vucic said the conference was “difficult because Serbia has a different stance from other participants.” He complained Kosovo, whose calls to be recognized as a sovereign state Serbia rejects, had presented “maximalist demands.”

That position puts him at the center of a dilemma that, for now, remains unsolvable. It also makes him responsible for whatever comes next for Serbia.

“I can’t see myself living here with that ego-maniac running the whole place,” said Mladen Boskovic, a 21-year-old university student who said he’ll move away when he graduates. “I’m aware there are people who like him, but for me it’s unbearable.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.