‘Is This Real?’: A Serbian Investigative Journalist Reflects on the Country’s Stunning Election

OCCRP: How’s the newsroom? Are your colleagues at KRIK relieved, now that the pressure on you guys will ease?

SD: All of us are happy. But we also feel like we’re in a parallel timeline. It’s like, is this real?

We’re sitting in our office and talking freely. For 10 years, our rule was never to discuss any important stories in the office, because we understood that the secret service was spying on us all the time. We didn’t trust our office, it could have bugs. Usually we would go out to some place where we felt safe to discuss things.

I never trusted my apartment in Belgrade. I was censoring what I could say in there. Because I knew my apartment was definitely bugged. So you never really had a safe space where you could even talk.

But, today, we can just sit, and we can really communicate in our office. It’s a completely different life than yesterday. And that was our first journalistic day of working in freedom.

KRIK was founded in 2015. We were founded in Vučić’s time. And, every day we worked, it was in Vučić’s time. So now we’ll see what it’s like to work in freedom, which is something we never really had. So, it’s strange now, for everyone, this is new, new, new.

OCCRP: If you had to boil down the reason for people’s dissatisfaction with Vučić, would you say corruption was the main thing?

SD: Yeah. He was connected to organized crime, but corruption was the first thing. You could feel the corruption, that’s the thing.

Because people couldn’t get any jobs. Only members of his party could get jobs. People couldn’t start their own businesses. The financial inspectors would come and shut them down. But the party people can open businesses. So, people could really feel the corruption.

Unfortunately, too, a lot of people died. When this rail station [in the city of Novi Sad] collapsed, people died.

People didn’t just feel that they were losing money, that they weren’t living a good life. They saw people die, and that everybody who lives in Serbia could have been standing in that spot. In the end, they thought, we’re going to die because these people are stealing money.

OCCRP: You mentioned that the established opposition would stay in Belgrade and not go to the villages. Did the students make an effort to go to smaller places? I remember that was also a big deal in Hungary, with Péter Magyar’s campaign.

SD: Yeah… the students, they had a campaign called “a student in every village.”

And Vučić, of course, put a lot of lies about the students, saying that they work for the Secret Service and this and that. But when you see them going to the villages and talking with the grannies, with peasants, with farmers, when you have this real life experience, that really changed people and helped them to earn huge support.

I think that was one of the main focuses of their campaign. More than doing stuff in Belgrade. Belgrade is easy. You have the most progressive people, and it’s easier to win. You don’t need to really be there.

OCCRP: So that’s one way of defeating a situation where the media is controlled by the government — you have to reach people in person, because otherwise the only thing they hear is the pro-government media.

SD: Yeah, exactly. But usually, nobody will do that.

The typical opposition in Europe is complaining about social media. They complain that they cannot reach people because of these troll campaigns, but they will not actually go [in person]. But you really need to go to every village.

And that’s nothing new. That’s like old-school politics, right? We just have to literally get back to the ways of how politics was done, and not allow social media to make you lazy.

The social media algorithms will always boost content that helps populists, right? All the hate speech, the anti-immigrant things, will always be pushed. So you have to literally meet people and talk. We in KRIK have a bit of experience, because we do a lot of crowdfunding, we have connections with our audience. So we understood how important it is to do that stuff.

So I hope, at least in Europe and the US, politics will return to this old-school way a little bit.

OCCRP: Turning to the future, what do you expect will happen now?

SD: Now we have a lot of work to do. Now comes the really tough period. I think it’s important to learn from history.

There’s a chance to change things, but Vučić left a really strong system. All the big businesses, the whole economy is in the hands of his oligarchs. Organized crime is powerful. So this will not be easy.

And we need to learn from what happened in the past. After Milošević was gone, [reformist Prime Minister Zoran] Đinđić was killed two years later, basically by a joint venture of the Secret Service and organized crime, because they didn’t want to allow the country to reform.

So we can celebrate tonight, but tomorrow it’s the beginning of a really big job. Now it’s really important that everyone really does their part of the work. We as journalists should continue to investigate.

I believe it will happen like in Milošević’s time — as we speak now, they’ll start destroying evidence and documents, bribing witnesses. In the next three months, we’re in a defining period where we need to discover as much as we can. And when the students constitute the assembly and the government, I hope that they’ll start prosecuting these people.

But it won’t be easy. Now the very difficult part is coming.

OCCRP: What about the criminal groups? They were heavily embedded in the Vučić regime. You’ve done a lot of reporting on that. Are they scared now? Are they running? Are they going to fight?

SD: They will do what they always do. They will not run. I believe the criminals are now thinking of finding a way to approach the students. I believe they will not succeed, but that’s how criminals work. They don’t care, in the end, for Vučić.

But I need to say, this is really funny to see. So like I said, last night Vučić brought these strong police forces to the center of Belgrade, and all of these hooligans and criminals, a really big number of them, to this park next to the presidential building.

And in the moment when he declared defeat on TV, and people started gathering in the center of town to celebrate, there is a video, the criminals who in the moment start running, you know, and you have like tens of them just running, literally running from this park. They’re only strong when they have protection, and when the police are working with them.

OCCRP: You sound pretty optimistic, because it seems like you really trust the students, is that fair to say?

SD: I trust the students because I completely trust their intentions; in those terms I’m optimistic. But I’m realistic about what’s going to happen now; it will be really hard.

And the second thing, I’m really afraid of what would happen — this also happened in the time after Milošević, when the democratic [forces] won — I think that we will feel in the following years a lot of the damage that Vučić did to the economy. I think it will be a hard period.

And I’m afraid of how people usually react — everywhere, not just in Serbia — if the economy isn’t perfect in two years, which is completely logical because we just now see how much devastation he left, if people aren’t happy in a year or two, they will not be able to make the connection to Vučić, they’ll most likely then blame the new power in Serbia.

OCCRP: And that was how Vučić came to power the first time, right? Taking advantage of disappointment with the democratic generation before him.

SD: Exactly. They needed to deal with the country left by Milošević, which was under sanctions and embargos and completely devastated. But people will say, the ones now in power are the ones to blame. So I think this is a big danger.

The problem is also that journalists need to change how they operate. I don’t think we can do old-school journalism anymore. So I think journalists can help, but we also need to find other ways to communicate these things and inform the audience. There’s a lot of fighting to be done.

But literally everything changed — the atmosphere on the streets. Before the protests, there was this kind of this dark atmosphere, cynical and dark, like there was no hope. Now it’s like living in a completely different country. It is insane and very refreshing.

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt of a longer interview that was originally published by OCCRP and is reposted here with permission. Watch the full interview on YouTube below.

Ilya Lozovsky is a is a staff writer and senior editor at OCCRP. Based in Amsterdam, he writes about the intersection of corruption and democracy; covers Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, and the Caucasus; edits investigations; and is working on new products in other formats. In a previous stint as OCCRP’s managing editor, Ilya helped develop the organization’s editorial workflow, coordinated cross-border investigations, and trained up-and-coming journalists on investigative editing and storytelling. Prior to joining OCCRP, Ilya edited and wrote for Foreign Policy magazine’s Democracy Lab channel in Washington. Ilya’s work has appeared in Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Haaretz, and other outlets.