In Serbia, there is a word for a form of stubbornness that sees someone act out of spite or defiance rather than yield to the will of others: “inat.”
It’s something Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić is showing remarkable levels of right now.
For almost a year, anti-government protests have roiled the Balkan nation. They intensified over summer 2025, culminating in angry clashes between students and police in August and September.
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The immediate trigger for the ongoing unrest came in November 2024 with the deadly collapse of a train station canopy in Novi Sad, a city in northern Serbia.
Renovated with funding from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the canopy was one of many projects touted by Vučić’s government as evidence of its success in attracting foreign investment. The accident’s 16 deaths, however, served to sharpen questions about corruption, failures of oversight and government accountability.
Student protests gathered momentum through winter and into spring. One demonstration, on March 15, saw more than 300,000 people turn out in Belgrade. Activists have also employed civil disobedience tactics, like staging pop-up roadblocks in Serbian cities, to maintain pressure on the government.
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In all this, Vučiċ has drawn on Kremlin talking points and an authoritarian playbook to distract attention away from his government’s practices. He and his allies cast the current protests not as a movement built on grassroots mobilization, but as the result of meddling by foreign agents.
In taking this authoritarian turn, Vučić invites critics to see parallels with Milošević, under whom the current president served in the 1990s as minister of information. Milošević, who died while on trial for war crimes, did much to inflame Serbian nationalism in the early 1990s and presided over the bloody wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. After Milošević’s ouster in the Bulldozer Revolution of 2000, Vučić spent a decade in opposition before returning to government in 2012.
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Like Milošević in the late 1990s, Vučić seems to have underestimated the force of “inat” of the Serbian people. The Bulldozer Revolution that ousted Milošević was comprised of Serbs from a wide range of backgrounds, all determined to bring down an unpopular autocrat who put his own political survival above the needs of citizens.
They did so through grassroots mobilization and shared recognition that the true obstacle to prosperity was not foreign conspiracy, but Milošević himself. For all his individual stubbornness and spite, Milošević could not match the resilience and determination of Serbia’s citizens.
That same energy appears to be in the streets of Belgrade now, sustained by a new generation of citizens standing firm against the tactic of a different autocratic leader.