Serbia's Vucic concedes election defeat in historic win for student movement

Interesting times.

I think you don't know what is oppression then.

(not downplaying how bad Vucic had been to Serbia, but the fact that people replaced him without violence and democratically means something still was in place)

Who will they blame it on this time? Maybe those of us in previously forced "Eastern Bloc" countries can now be allowed to have agency, to leave Moscow's influence if we choose to?

This is the problem for Moscow, now what they have openly asked Washington for help. The entire Moscow imperialist mirage is collapsing. There is no one else to blame now. In fact, forget Moscow, it's not a factor. It's just that none of us can deal with pure corruption and still run a great economy. For one thing, that's why so many super smart Russians escape their own country/low-trust environment.

Most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans see decent economic growth currently.

However, also. Whichever news source told you the eurozone was in recession, you should be a bit more sceptical of that news source. It’s just not correct. The eurozone had two short (< 1 year) technical recessions earlier in the decade caused by shocks from Covid and the invasion of Ukraine; beyond those it hasn’t been in recession since the financial crisis.

Eurozone growth is about 1% this year and projected to be 1.5% next year. Sluggish but far from a recession. This isn't to nitpick or to ignore real, challenging issues but there's a distorted media view on economic growth in Europe.

And a lot of these anti-democratic movements benefit from this purely vibes based information space politics.

The idea is for this to enable true democracy to re-appear, and then actual parties would battle it out in the next elections.

I'd say the risk to political stability in Serbia remains, but just like in any functioning democracy, what matters is that there is regular change and politicians understand that they are soon to be replaced (this avoids the levels of corruption that is multiples of base government project costs and actually cost lives).

Edit: Hopefully this ages poorly. It's a tight race

Disrupting the incumbent authoritarian while surviving LRAD attacks is pretty darn bad ass, and teaches lessons to us all.

On the incumbent side, even when you seem to have all control on your side, you can go too far in your corruption(civility/product/whatever) and lose.

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meta: I don't think the parent should have been just downvoted. Otherwise, genuine discussion is crushed. I updooted your question.

Hopefully, wounds are healing, and more productive friends can be found.

1. Were there snipers targeting civilians from the top of the hill south of Sarajevo? Undeniable, that was never debatable.

2. Was he present at that hill around the time snipers were shooting at civilians? Yes, he never denied being present there and that's where that one grainy video originates.

3. Were there rich foreigners on that hill doing "war tourism" or were all of the civilians shot by Serb forces exclusively? Up for debate, enough evidence to start some investigations, highly unlikely that those investigations will be able to say anything conclusive over 3 decades after.

4. Did he play any role in making those deals with rich foreigners? No evidence of that that's more concrete than putting him at the right place at roughly the right time.

So, him saying that he heard any sort of foreign language around him would be the evidence of #3, but him legitimately not witnessing any such thing (and everyone believing him) wouldn't really be the evidence of the contrary, as #3 could've happened before or (more likely) after his time on that hill.