Balkan Prince Revisited
Ten years ago, I wrote a short piece for an LSE Blog entitled Ten rules by a 21stcentury Machiavelli for the Balkan Prince, based on a talk I had given a few weeks earlier at LSE. To my surprise, the post went viral, with versions being republished throughout the Balkans, include a Star Wars like version on youtube in Albanian.
In my piece I outline the rules that Balkan autocrats were following to stay in power. I was closely observing the rise to power of Aleksandar Vučić, at the time Prime Minister and how he was bending the democratic rules to slander the opposition and impose his dominance. I recognised the patterns with Milo Djukanović in Montenegro and Nikola Gruevski in North Macedonia and there were plenty other candidates the region. What they shared was a formal commitment to democracy, while they did everything to secure their power, often disregarding the basic premises of democracy.
I never thought that there was anything specific Balkan about this. I was just most familiar with this dynamic there. Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were heading in the same direction.
Ten years later Vučić is still in charge. However, he is under unprecedented pressure with months of massive student protests, joined by thousands of citizens. Whether he will weather this threat remains unclear as I am writing these lines (I wrote some notes on how to challenge the Balkan prince a few months later), but what is clear is that this system of rule has spread globally. Most notably, the US under the second Trump term has been rapidly joining the pattern of a competitive authoritarian regime. While each of these regimes operates within its national institutional structures and social themes, there are global patterns. Equally, a threat to one is a threat to all. It is not coincidental that Russia under Putin is obsessed about the threat of ‘colored revolutions’ that might undermine the regime. Similarly Vučić’s regime keeps worrying about such threats and blames Western powers to support the protests (even while the ‘West’ both the US and EU are eagerly supporting the regime).
When citizens are able to mobilize against such regimes which claim to rule on behalf of a majority, it matters as it shows that change is possible. In 2016, a year after I wrote my original Machiavellian guide, the regime of Nikola Gruevski in North Macedonia collapsed after the opposition released secret tapes made by the intelligence agency not just demonstrating the rampant government monitoring but also revealing massive abuse of office. Within a year the government was gone. Massive citizen movements, a well organized opposition and EU intervention (with the help of the US) created a context in which free and fair elections and a change of government became possible again.
The current circumstances are much more ominous, not just for the citizens protesting in Serbia, but also for democracy globally, as the US rapidly becoming an advocate of the far-right and autocrats and the EU has been passive and supporting autocrats for short-sighted gains. This risks making autocrats flourish. However, the enthusiasm and focus of the students in Serbia shows that the citizen’s pressure for rule of law and democracy is not dictated by geopolitics.