A student-led protest motion in Serbia rallied greater than 100,000 folks for an enormous peaceable avenue demonstration on Saturday in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, defying warnings from the nation’s embattled strongman chief that months of unrest had been careening uncontrolled into violence.
Saturday’s rally, the most important outpouring of public discontent in Serbia in many years, was preceded by a drumbeat of warnings from President Aleksandar Vucic and his expansive media equipment that protesters had been planning violent assaults to impress “civil warfare” and seize energy.
Opposition politicians added to a foreboding temper by claiming that they’d acquired data from inside Serbia’s safety service of secret plans to arrest Mr. Vucic’s political rivals.
However Saturday’s rally, which started outdoors the Parliament constructing in Belgrade and shortly engulfed the town middle, handed with out main incident. Supporters of President Vucic gathered in a park close to Parliament and threw stones at college students. However fears that the federal government would deploy warfare veterans and soccer hooligans linked to organized crime gangs to beat protesters — because it has previously — didn’t materialize.
The Belgrade police stated the protesters numbered 107,000 whereas college students at Belgrade College’s college of dramatic arts, which helped set up the rally, put the turnout at 800,000.
