The Left’s Balkan Battleground

The half-dozen countries of the western Balkans are among the poorest in Europe. They suffer rampant unemployment and inflation, long-term exclusion from the privileged club of European Union economies and exploitation by authoritarian and nationalist leaders supported to various degrees by Moscow, Brussels and Washington. And yet, despite this hostile environment, a small but growing constellation of Leftist parties and movements across the region — in Serbia, Croatia and Albania — are finding common cause on the basis of ecological principles, anti-nationalism, anti-corruption and basic rights for workers and minorities. 

The winds of change are blowing strongly in Serbia. Earlier this year, the region’s largest country was stunned by Europe’s bloodiest school shooting in 15 years, when a 13-year-old killed 10- victims. Days later, another shooting killed eight more people. The senseless violence detonated long-simmering rage over gutted social infrastructure, and led to the biggest demonstrations in Belgrade since the fall of nationalist strongman Slobodan Milošević in 2000. “It’s oversimplifying to say a violent society creates violent children. But [the shooting] made people realise that when you don’t have stability, anything is possible, and nothing is safe,” said Jelena Vasiljevic, who represents a green-left coalition in the Belgrade City Assembly.

“People here are ready for change, in spite of an opposition which is not organized or united,” adds opposition MP Biljana Stojković. Speaking in the capital, Stojković explains her green-left Zajedno (“Together”) movement has joined forces with smaller centrist and right-of-center opposition parties to form the “Serbia Against Violence” coalition, which she believed had an unprecedented chance of loosening autocratic President Aleksandar Vučić’s stranglehold and winning power in the Belgrade City Assembly.

As its name suggests, this broad-church, pro-European coalition has run an essentially negative campaign, using slogans like “everything must stop” and “a normal life,” while focusing on dislodging Vučić and ending corruption rather than proposing more structural reforms. Vučić claimed victory in the election held on Dec. 18, even as the opposition and international observers cried foul, pointing to violence, voter intimidation, ghost voters and an alleged 40,000 non-registered voters bussed in to push the autocrat over the mark.

Opposition leaders have declared a hunger-strike until the results are overturned, but given Vučić’s grip on state institutions, there is little hope of a fair contest. At a raucous post-election demonstration outside the electoral commission, the conciliatory Serbian flags distributed at earlier rallies have vanished, as frustrated protesters pelt darkened windows with toilet-roll. “I’ve no idea what can tip the scales and cause some actual changes,” said a 23-year-old demonstrator named Vladimir. “I understand why people lose hope. It’s not just the past days, but the past 12 years.”

The opposition faces challenges beyond media capture and unfair elections. The professional, English-speaking, pro-Western crowd at “Serbia Against Violence” rallies stands in stark contrast to the national majority backing Vučić. “Although hundreds of thousands of people have protested, we are still a minority,” Vladimir notes. At a pro-government rally earlier this year, shaven-headed youths clustered round the stage and repeated government talking points, representing the protest as a spontaneous, apolitical show of national solidarity. In reality, buses brought in pro-government hooligans, state employees, war veterans, Serb nationalists from neighbouring countries and pensioners in pursuit of cash handouts or even free nibbles, with state representatives dishing out Vučić-branded cereal bars.

It’s just these latter groups that the Leftist opposition must reach if it is to change the political dynamic. And they are struggling to do so, Stojković explains, particularly outside the capital. “As a Leftist, I believe we must reach the poorest people, but parts of Serbia don’t even know the opposition exists.” Beyond blanket, supportive media coverage, Vučić will buy off voters and massage electoral statistics, guaranteeing he will retain ultimate power. “The social role of the state doesn’t exist any more. People must be members [of Vučić’s party] to get some help. That’s the evilest thing he did in this society,” Stojković adds. 

Meanwhile, in neighboring Croatia, the leftist Možemo (“We Can”) movement has shown their Serbian counterpart that institutional change is possible by winning control of the Zagreb City Assembly. Spokesperson Gordan Bosanac says his movement, too, faces challenges in shedding their “hipsters from Zagreb” image and connecting with laborers and agricultural workers, but notes they are gradually winning national support through anti-corruption reforms and promised debt relief. Ahead of next year’s national elections, the Croatian movement feels strong enough to run their own campaign rather than uniting with the country’s centrist opposition.

It’s a striking contrast with Serbia, where the embattled Left has been forced into electoral alliances with centrist and nationalist opposition parties who differ on the crucial question of independence for the ethnically Albanian region Kosovo. For these national struggles are not occurring in a vacuum. Rather, Russia and the EU both seek influence in the Western Balkans, a region seen as a crucial future battleground between Moscow and NATO. Vučić relies on nationalist rhetoric and simmering Serbian resentment over crippling 1990s sanctions and a NATO bombing campaign to keep his base inflamed against the West, with Putin’s popularity levels in the country outstripping even Vučić himself.  

In this climate, the Serbian opposition remains firmly pro-European — a way to establish distance from the nationalist violence of the 1990s. “Here, anti-EU [politics] often masks nationalism,” argues Vasilevic. “Being pro-EU is where liberals and Leftists converge.” 

While moving closer to Brussels might represent Serbia’s best chance of securing outside investment and more protections for workers, women and minorities, the country stands little chance of being granted EU membership. The same is true in other Western Balkan nations where people can only look jealously at what Bosanac calls the “really tremendous financial input, schools, hospitals and freedom of movement” provided by the EU to Croatia, a Western-backed tourist hotspot unique in being granted rapid EU membership. While nationalist rhetoric and authoritarian lurches have made it clear that “entering the EU is no guarantee of rule of law,” Bosanac nonetheless emphasizes that most Croatians have seen concrete benefits from EU accession since 2013.

Serbians are well aware that the EU’s approach has lately been more carrot than stick, exploiting Russia’s increasing isolation to push for concessions over Kosovo. The EU is at the forefront of controversial plans to exploit Serbia’s lithium reserves to the benefit of pro-government elites and the detriment of local residents, while the canny politician Vučić also enjoys close relations with Brussels, presenting himself as the only player capable of keeping the country stable and secure. Serbians have the region’s lowest levels of support for joining an institution seen as elitist, disengaged and culpable for the loss of Kosovo. 

Practically, Putin has done very little for ordinary Serbs, and widespread sympathy for Russia is motivated more by anti-Western resentment than any deep-rooted support for the invasion of Ukraine. With the EU currently showing no real interest in working with the progressive opposition, Stojkovic’s unwieldy electoral coalition faces an uphill task in convincing voters that Brussels can protect their interests.

Today, the Balkan Left must navigate between reformist policies aimed at disinterested EU technocrats, and nationalist sentiments that lean toward Moscow. For many decades, the region was able to play an outsized role as the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Under Josip Broz Tito, the communist federation achieved an impressive degree of inter-ethnic tolerance, backed by a unique model of “self-managed” socialism, famously spearheading a global “non-aligned” movement of nations seeking to evade the controlling influence of both Washington and Moscow. But as this federation broke apart under Western pressure following the collapse of the USSR, inter-ethnic violence flared, epitomized by the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica by Serbian forces.

Bitter nationalist sentiments that swelled throughout the breakup of Yugoslavia continue to animate regional politics and create stumbling-blocks for the region’s Left. In Croatia, Možemo has taken the unprecedented, conciliatory step of erecting a monument to a family of Serb victims of Croat violence in the 1990s; but one of the movement’s mayors has also attracted flak from the Left for laying flowers on the grave of the country’s own ultra-nationalist leader, Franjo Tuđman. After the fall of Milosevic, who painted himself as the heir of inter-ethnic Yugoslavia while fanning the flames of Serbian nationalism and lining the pockets of a small elite, “it took more than a decade for the idea of a left movement to be rehabilitated,” Vasiljevic explains. Appeals to socialist values are sometimes dismissed by voters as harking back to a past they would sooner forget. 

These challenges are especially acute in Albania, Europe’s second-poorest country behind Kosovo. “For people here, it’s very difficult to understand their power,” explains Ariela Zeneli of Albania’s Lëvizja Bashkë (“Together Movement”). “When we focused on basic political issues like a minimum wage, they thought this was communism!” 

Zeneli is speaking in Albanian capital Tirana, where a pyramid-shaped mausoleum erected by former communist dictator Enver Hoxha has just been turned into a hub for upskilling IT workers. The project is a striking illustration of the extent to which hyper-capitalist sentiment has obliterated any connection to the communist past.

In this climate, exploitation is rampant and Albania still has no minimum wage. In their work to organize miners and female garment workers in demanding a single-dollar increase in their $8 daily wage, Lëvizja Bashkë movement activists must face down arrests and a media black-out. Organized crime and pyramid schemes flooded the country following communism’s collapse, ruining countless lives and contributing to a post-ideological political atmosphere. According to Zeleni’s colleague Mirela Ruko, who represents the movement in the Tirana City Assembly, the two main Democratic and Socialist parties are “ideologically indistinguishable, socialist and democratic in name only,” offering voters little alternative beyond different flavors of corruption. The complaint echoes Bosanac’s comments about Croatia’s establishment parties.

The Lëvizja Bashkë program is animated by the same progressive spirit as the Green-Left coalitions in Croatia and Serbia (as well as smaller, related movements in the former Yugoslav republics of Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.) In 2023, representatives from six regional Green-Left movements held a meeting to sign a declaration against nationalist violence. Transnational ecological concerns, in particular, could one day help realize Stojkovic’s vision of a rejuvenated western Balkan bloc jointly negotiating EU accession.

For now, the region’s green-left movements remain fragmented, isolated and struggling for national influence. Though they share the same name, activists with the two “Together” movements in Albania and Serbia are all but unaware of each other’s existence. Many young activists and demonstrators are planning to leave the region, joining a drain of migration to the West. As Ruko notes, young Albanians who travel abroad to benefit from the welfare state in Europe are unaware that this welfare state was won through the struggle of socialist organizers inspired by principles that have been discarded in the region in favor of unfettered crony capitalism.

The political divides remain profound. Between a small, professional, liberal, cosmopolitan class in regional capitals; a coterie of cynical, post-ideological businessmen and politicians, able to exploit nationalist sentiment while doing business with West and East alike; and a rural hinterland full of aging, impoverished, forgotten, laid-off workers. A small, embattled Left must strategize how to bridge these divides, hammering out a vision for renewed regional cooperation, with few resources to bring it to the people who need it most.