Students in blockade held a rally in Kraljevo titled “Everything is Visible on Vidovdan”. Through the speeches of the participants, the theme of Kosovo and Metohija was threaded together with reflections on the historical legacy of Vidovdan, alongside messages about accountability, social conditions, and the need for change in Serbia.
A day earlier in Belgrade, an SNS rally was held where President Aleksandar Vučić said, among other things, that these are his final weeks as President of the Republic. Lazar Marićević, a political scientist, psychologist, and founder of the Centre for the Development of Serbia, spoke to Insajder about what we saw and heard over the weekend.
Speaking about the rally in Kraljevo, Marićević said that it was yet another campaign rally through which students are motivating citizens and spreading their idea—ensuring people see that they exist, and that they can pull it off in the heat, regardless of how many people gathered, which is enough for a campaign rally.
Lazar Marićević stated that no one else but the students could do that “without having paid people to show up”.
“By that, I mean the government, which can no longer do it, and of course the opposition, which likewise cannot gather a large number of people in this manner. So, even if it is a couple of thousand people without any campaign, people came of their own free will, and that is quite enough,” he said.
The theme of Kosovo was woven through the speeches; specifically, the attitude towards institutions was placed within the context of Kosovo.
“Whatever anyone might think, regardless of sentiments and the rest, it is still a constitutional category. I mean, it existed before the constitution, but here it has been additionally reinforced by the preamble,” Marićević noted, adding that on one hand, this is an appeal to the Constitution.
As he added, the government has been manipulating this topic since its inception in various guises: “And so, in this way, the students have already taken that piece of the topic away from them.”
“And in my view, what is important – which they are being challenged on from various sides – is what do they actually represent? They represent a national civic option, or a patriotic civic option, which advocates for the preservation of institutions, for the functioning of institutions, and, to put it this way, for us as a country to head in the direction of a normal democratic society,” he said, adding that debates can be held within that framework, rather than the types of conversations currently being proposed using various derogatory terms.
When asked whether choosing such national themes is a burden or an open space for other parties that are more vocally civic and pro-European, he said that this burden is different from what it was before 1999, when the story took on a completely different dimension.
He noted that every government, ever since Zoran Đinđić, through Boris Tadić, and even the current one, has tried to approach this problem in different ways, with various agreements, and with certain guarantees that we were supposed to receive but which were not fulfilled by the other side.
“I think everyone has some sort of solution, but the solutions are not implementable. When I think about it like this, we carry this burden that we don’t know what to do with concretely, and no one dares to give concrete answers because it won’t look good in a campaign,” he said.
Commenting on yesterday’s SNS rally and President Vučić’s announcement that he will resign in a few weeks, Marićević said that this was also a campaign rally, but that it served as an important moment to test the party machinery.
“To see who will do what in terms of the quotas they were given, how many people each person can mobilise, and to see how complacent they have become, to what extent they are busy with other businesses, who has gone to the seaside, who is counting the money they’ve made, and so on. So, in that way, they tested their party machinery,” he said.
Regarding Vučić’s words that he would be president for only a few more weeks, Insajder’s interlocutor points out that Vučić said today that elections can be called 90 days after a resignation.
“So, if we add up those few weeks – let’s say 10 to 12 – plus this, we have arrived at an election year,” he said.
He points out that Vučić’s speech was interesting and, in his view, the strangest so far because the president “sort of poured everything into one place and mentioned every single topic”. He says that Vučić was dictating the rhythm, rather than the rhythm coming from the crowd.
“The entire speech did not feel like the way he usually delivers them, which goes to show that they cannot escape this state of permanent crisis ever since the anti-lithium protests began.”
(Insajder, 29.06.2026)