Serbia Before the Election: Fico Praises Vučić, and Ten Journalists Walk Out of N1

Serbia goes to snap elections on October 25, and the last week of the campaign shows everything you need to know about how politics is done in Belgrade. The ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) got backing from Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, students are marching on foot from across the country towards the capital, and one of the few critical TV stations in the country has lost ten of its journalists.

At the Progressives' rally in Novi Sad on Friday evening, Fico stood behind Aleksandar Vučić - until recently Serbia's president, and now the head of the SNS list. Speaking in Serbian, the Slovak prime minister said he supports Vučić because he is "a leader with a spine" who "in the interest of his country knows how to say no even when others demand that we think and act the same." When a foreign prime minister climbs onto someone else's campaign stage, that is no longer friendship. That is campaigning.

Vučić himself used the speech to attack the students who for almost two years led the anti-government protests after the collapse of the canopy at the Novi Sad railway station, in which 16 people died. "Some used the tragedy to carry out their own politics... Everything they said, they made up," he said, claiming that "some others from abroad" were running the whole game. People demanded accountability for 16 dead, and the government's answer is that the protests were directed by someone from outside.

"We will extend a hand to our opponents, but first we will beat them on Sunday," Vučić said. The student movement is running in the election with the "Student List - The Students Are Winning", which according to opinion polls is the Progressives' most serious rival. The students keep up their marches across Serbia towards Belgrade, where they have scheduled a big closing rally for October 22.

The opposition movement Kreni-Promeni claims the Novi Sad rally was broadcast by 35 pro-government TV stations. According to the official estimate of Serbia's Interior Ministry, the SNS bussed in more than 100,000 people from Vojvodina and from all over Serbia. Judging by comments on social media, most people in Novi Sad do not believe the police figure.

The media quietly change owners

While the stage fills up, the newsrooms empty out. The new management of Adria News Network (ANN), taken over in August by the Portuguese company Alpac Capital, appointed Marko Stjepanović from the pro-government "Blic" as editor-in-chief of the Nova.rs portal. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) called it "the latest episode in the wave of repression in Serbia." Nova.rs journalists rejected the offer to decide within 48 hours whether to accept the imposed editors or take severance and leave, and are now trying to keep their editorial powers from being taken away.

In Serbia, Alpac Capital took over as a package the cable channels N1 and Nova, the Nova.rs portal and the newspapers "Danas" and "Radar". On Friday it was confirmed that ten prominent N1 journalists and presenters had resigned. The newsroom said it "deeply regrets" its colleagues' decision to give up the common goal of preserving what had been built over 12 years. "We are continuing on separate paths and that makes our fight harder, but we will not give up our professional and moral principles," N1 said.

EFJ Secretary General Ricardo Gutiérrez said Serbia is the country where the biggest decline in media freedom in Europe has been recorded in recent months. When the media change owners two months before an election and journalists leave as a group, who will tell us what really happened after October 25?