Ana Brnabić, the Speaker of the Serbian Assembly and an SNS member, had one sentence for the student demonstrators in Belgrade who are unhappy: "Don't you like Serbia? Go to Croatia, they have open doors." A statement that sounds innocent in diplomatic terms is, politically, an open attack.

Brnabić piled up a whole set of claims in the same statement. Students are allegedly getting "direct instructions from abroad," especially from Zagreb. Croatia supposedly has a "strategic interest" in Vučić leaving because "Serbia has overtaken Croatia in GDP and infrastructure." And the most provocative line: if the protesters come to power, "there will be no more elections."

This is rhetoric that repeats across the years. First: the supranational conspiracies. Foreign powers organize everything. Second: the comparison with neighbors paints them as bad, not us as bad. Third: the intimidation - if we don't win, the apocalypse will happen. It's a textbook autocratic formula compressed into a short form in one morning statement.

Croatian media reacted. Whole columns appeared with headlines like "This is how Brnabić lies to Serbs about Croatia." That's part of a longer pattern - tension between Belgrade and Zagreb is never far from the surface. When politicians in Serbia want to discredit the opposition, Croatia is a convenient target. When Croatian media want to discredit Vučić, SNS is a convenient target.

For Macedonia, this is familiar territory. How many times have politicians told critics to "go to the neighborhood"? How many times have neighboring states been accused of organizing protests? Balkan politics isn't innovative with these rhetorical tools - it's cyclical. And every cycle repeats the same mistakes, just with slightly different syntax.