On narratives and fairytales: Serbia’s authoritarian leader’s playbook

Student-led protests in Novi Beograd Municipality on February 8th, 2025. Drawing depicting Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. Photo: Aleksandra Vitorović / Shutterstock

A tragedy at a train station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, has triggered a wave of student protests that has swept through the country for over three months. Demonstrators demand accountability for government corruption, yet they have been met with brutal force—pro-regime thugs beating them in the streets. Rather than addressing the grievances, Serbia’s authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vučić, has spun an all-too-familiar tale. The protests, he claims, are orchestrated by Western intelligence agencies bent on fomenting a colour revolution.

It is a narrative carefully crafted to serve a purpose. In Vučić’s playbook, the truth is malleable, and reality is something to be authored and performed. To understand his strategy, one must first turn to the tools of fiction—characters, plots, and, above all, the power of a compelling story.

The Leader

Some Serbian commentators have likened Vučić to the protagonist of Vođa (The Leader), a biting satirical tale by Radoje Domanović. In the story, a group of desperate people from an impoverished place, unable to agree on a leader, finally settles on a stranger. With unwavering confidence, he leads them over mountains and through perilous terrain. One by one, they fall—injured, exhausted, dead. Those who abandon the journey are labelled traitors. In the end, only three remain, and they make a shocking discovery: their leader is blind.

The comparison is striking, but ultimately misleading. Vučić is no blind man stumbling through the dark. He is a master manipulator who knows precisely where he is leading Serbia. Unlike Domanović’s hapless leader, Vučić controls the narrative, shifting roles as needed—victim, saviour, persecutor. His method can be best understood through a psychological framework: the Karpman drama triangle.

In 1968, psychologist Stephen Karpman proposed that every fairytale operates on a three-character model: the persecutor, the victim, and the rescuer. The persecutor torments the victim, while the rescuer swoops in to save the day. Yet the brilliance of Karpman’s model lies in its fluidity—roles shift, and characters double back on themselves.

Consider the tale of the Pied Piper: he begins as a rescuer, freeing a town from a rat infestation. But when the mayor refuses to pay him, he transforms into a persecutor, leading the town’s children away in vengeance. The mayor, once a victim of the rats, becomes the persecutor by cheating the Piper, then shifts back to victim as he mourns the loss of his children. In a single narrative, identities are upended, roles reversed.

And so it is with Vučić.

Enter Vučić

Aleksandar Vučić is a masterful storyteller and a skilled performer, often displaying signs of main character syndrome. Like US President Donald Trump, he frequently speaks in hyperboles and refers to himself in the third person—behaviour that psychologists often associate with narcissistic traits.

Over the years, Serbia’s media landscape has been carefully moulded to reflect Vučić’s vision. With television networks and tabloids firmly in the grip of the regime, the president’s chosen narratives saturate the airwaves. They trumpet Serbia’s economic “miracle” while ignoring the erosion of political freedoms, celebrate grand infrastructure projects as testaments to national progress while minimising environmental crises, and frame foreign powers as either benevolent patrons or shadowy conspirators, depending on the day’s needs.

Vučić spends a lot of energy on narrating his views. One study found that he and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) commanded nearly 90 percent of all media coverage, a number that would be impressive even in the most disciplined of autocracies. His monologues are exhaustive, sometimes quite literally. When protests erupted over his lithium mining deal, Vučić responded with a television blitzkrieg: in just four days, he logged a staggering 14 hours and 47 minutes of live airtime, defending his position with the intensity of a man both deeply aggrieved and utterly certain of his own rectitude. His narrative was, of course, reinforced by national broadcasters and a sycophantic tabloid press.

His storytelling is nothing if not dramatic. No Serb, if one is to believe his own accounts, works harder, sacrifices more, or achieves greater feats than Vučić himself. At one point, he claimed that despite lacking natural academic talent, his sheer force of will had propelled him to a summa cum laude law degree in record time. The actual timeline tells a different story: it took him six years to complete his studies, and his grades remain a mystery.

Then there is the matter of his omnipresence. Vučić has cultivated a godlike image of a leader who is everywhere, always. In the space of a single day, he might inaugurate a factory in Novi Sad, hold a closed-door meeting with business leaders in Belgrade, and then appear on a late-night television show to ruminate on the future of Serbia. The performance never stops. The message is clear: there is no Serbia without Vučić.

The favourite scripts

Vučić’s political theatre operates on a predictable rotation of two well-worn scripts. These narratives do not merely bolster his image; they shape the Serbian public’s perception of friends, enemies, and history itself.

The first script casts Vučić as a man perpetually under siege—a victim, battered by dark and nameless forces. But in a dramatic twist, he is also his own rescuer. In this telling, Vučić is both the damsel and the knight, the persecuted and the triumphant.

Take, for instance, his account of a fateful evening in October 2000, just as Slobodan Milošević was losing power. As Vučić tells it, he was taking a walk with his son when two “junkies” launched an unprovoked attack. Against all odds, the future Serbian president single-handedly overpowered his assailants, knocking them unconscious. The anecdote is rich in subtext: Serbia, too, was under attack, and Milošević’s fall would usher in an era of chaos and ruin. The unspoken conclusion is that only a strongman—one who can both endure suffering and vanquish threats—can keep Serbia from further collapse.

The Serbian media, firmly under Vučić’s control, has also been awash with a parade of alleged assassination plots, all following the same formula. The threat is always dire, but Vučić, ever the hero, refuses to be cowed. When then-Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin reportedly was “shaking with fear” and implored the president to wear a bulletproof vest following the uncovering of a supposed assassination plot, Vučić, steadfast and fearless, rebuffed the suggestion with a simple: “I will never wear it.” These assassination plots are curiously light on details—who, exactly, is trying to kill him, and why?—but they invariably reach the same conclusion: Vučić is brave and, against all odds, survives.

The second go-to script expands the narrative of victimhood beyond Vučić himself, casting all Serbs—whether from Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, or Montenegro—as perpetual victims, while the West—NATO, the EU, the United States—plays the role of the relentless aggressor. And then, of course, there is Vučić, their lone defender. In this narrative, no one but Vučić has the strength, intelligence, or sheer presence to stand up for Serbs. The omnipresence he has so carefully cultivated only reinforces the notion that without him, Serbia would be lost.

In this version of history, Kosovo Albanians are not a people struggling for self-determination. Rather, they are the architects of “pogroms and ethnic cleansing” against Kosovo Serbs, while Vučić, the protector, stands firm, vowing that he will never allow Kosovo to be “given away.” The accusation is rich, coming from a man who once called for genocide against Bosniaks during the Bosnian War and served as Slobodan Milošević’s minister of propaganda during Serbia’s brutal campaign in Kosovo, when nearly 90 per cent of Kosovo Albanians were displaced, and countless massacres were committed.

Then there was the drama surrounding the UN Resolution on the Srebrenica Genocide, which Vučić framed not as a condemnation of a historical atrocity, but as a direct assault on Serbs everywhere. He portrayed the resolution as an attempt to paint all Serbs as villains. And then, in a final flourish, he draped himself in the Serbian flag, shed a few crocodile tears, and presented himself as the lone warrior against Serb victimisation. It was a masterful performance, one that had little to do with the truth, but everything to do with power.

At present, Vučić’s response to the Novi Sad canopy disaster hovers between the two go-to scripts. The student protests, he suggests, are the work of foreign agents—unseen perpetrators scheming to destabilise Serbia. By implication, he is the victim, and so are the Serbian people, whose hard-won progress is under attack. And yet, as always, Vučić—who has dominated Serbian politics for nearly a decade and presided over widespread corruption—also casts himself as the rescuer, positioning himself as the mediator between the government and the protesters, the only figure capable of restoring order.

On victimhood nationalism

Anyone who has spent time in the Balkans will recognise that Serbian nationalism—both in Serbia and among ethnic Serbs elsewhere—is fuelled less by triumph than by grievance, or as Ivan Milenković put it, “Serbs suffer from some kind of eternal victim syndrome.” The sense of historical victimhood is not merely a feature of Serbian identity; it is its animating force, the emotional undercurrent that has long propelled nationalist ambitions, from Greater Serbia to its modern incarnation, Sprpski svet—the “Serbian World.”

This historical narrative draws from a well-stocked arsenal of wounds. There is the Battle of Kosovo (1389), a medieval clash that has been mythologised into a nation-defining tragedy. There is the long era of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule, during which Serbs endured relentless subjugation. And there is, of course, the Ustaše’s campaign of terror against Serbs during World War II, a period of genuine horror that has left lasting scars.

Slobodan Milošević, Vučić’s former boss, understood the power of these grievances better than most. His 1989 Gazimestan speech, commemorating the 600^th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, was a masterclass in historical reanimation. To drive home the point, he orchestrated a grand, almost religious spectacle: the remains of Prince Lazar, the Serbian martyr of 1389, were paraded through Serb-inhabited territories across Yugoslavia. It was a political funeral tour, a reminder that the past was not dead, but very much alive—and that Serbia’s enemies were still lurking. This spectacle was not just a nod to history—it was one of the early sparks that reignited Serb nationalism throughout Yugoslavia, fuelling grievances that would contribute to the country’s violent breakup.

The victimhood narrative did not end with Milošević, nor was it confined to medieval history. Serbian media continue to highlight the suffering of Serbs during the Yugoslav wars, especially the NATO bombings of the 1990s—first targeting Bosnian Serb military positions in 1995 during the Bosnian War, and later striking rump Yugoslavia, which included Serbia and Montenegro, in 1999 during the Kosovo War. The context of these bombings—their intent to halt large-scale atrocities—do not features in these accounts. Instead, NATO is framed as the faceless aggressor — an unfeeling force imposing suffering on Serbs — a view that has taken deep root. Unsurprisingly, a recent International Republican Institute (IRI) poll found that only 3 per cent of Serbians favour full NATO membership, while the highest percentage (36 per cent) see the United States as their country’s greatest threat.

The Kremlin, ever attuned to narratives of Western malfeasance, has not let this sentiment go to waste. Russian propaganda in the Balkans amplifies both real and imagined Serb victimhood, painting the West as a perpetual villain. In 2019, Russia and Serbia’s culture ministries co-produced Balkanska međa (Balkan Line), an action-packed, Hollywood-style war film that fictionalises the closing days of the Kosovo War. In its telling, Serbs are noble victims, Kosovars are bloodthirsty war criminals backed by NATO, and Russians—stoic, heroic—ride to the rescue. The film drapes itself in historical accuracy, but it is a riot of disinformation, a pastiche of grievance wrapped in the aesthetics of military bravado.

None of this is to diminish the very real atrocities committed against Serbs. History is rarely so tidy. During World War II, the extermination of Serbs at Jasenovac—the Ustaše-run concentration camp—was a genuine horror. Even in cases where Serbs were the initial aggressors, they sometimes became victims in turn, as in Operation Storm (1995), when Croatian forces expelled hundreds of thousands of Serbs from the Krajina region, leaving many dead in their wake. But in Serbian nationalist discourse, victimhood is never just an acknowledgment of past suffering; it is a political weapon, a justification, and, in the hands of figures like Vučić, an ever-replenishing well of legitimacy.

So what?

Vučić’s propaganda machine runs on two well-worn scripts. In both, Serbs are perpetual victims, and Vučić is the ever-reliable saviour—sometimes with an assist from Russia or China. In both, the enemy is either the faceless assassin or, more often, the West. The consequences of these narratives are far from benign.

Like Milošević before him, Vučić weaponizes Serbian victimhood for political gain. A nation perpetually under siege—at least in its own imagination—needs a strong leader, one willing to bend the rules. This logic has given Vučić extraordinary latitude, both domestically and in the region. The mythology of Vučić the Rescuer allows him to act unconstitutionally and get away with it. In 2016, when masked men in Belgrade tied up onlookers, confiscated their phones, and razed buildings under the cover of darkness—armed with bats and knives, beating those who resisted—to clear space for a €3 billion real estate project, no one was held accountable. One of the new towers, Kula Belgrade, stands at 42 floors tall, though some locals have dubbed it something less grandiose: “Vučić’s penis”.

When protests erupted in Belgrade over the nocturnal demolition, much of Serbia remained silent. Vučić had sold them on a different narrative—that economic development, even if achieved through a few human rights violations, was worth the price. And so, Serbia became a surveillance state. Thousands of Huawei cameras equipped with facial and license plate recognition now line the streets of Belgrade and far beyond. Powerful surveillance tools like Pegasus spyware, Cytrox’s Predator, and Clearview AI, enhance the government’s ability to track its citizens. Meanwhile, Serbia has experienced the fastest democratic backsliding in the Balkans. Freedom House has reclassified the country from “partly free to an “autocratizing hybrid” regime. Election rigging aside, many Serbians continue to blindly support Vučić’s SNS, while the EU continues to reward Serbia with significant support.

The victimhood narrative is not just a domestic tool—it is a geopolitical destabiliser, especially considering that Serbian media operates throughout the Balkans. As such, it keeps Serbs, from Belgrade to Pale, trapped in historical grievance, preventing reconciliation with their neighbours. It stands in the way of resolving the Serbia-Kosovo conflict, a situation Vučić can always escalate to distract from troubles at home. If Germany’s postwar reckoning reshaped its place in Europe, Serbia’s reluctance to do the same prevents it from assuming a meaningful role in the Balkans.

Nationalist victimhood also stunts Serbia’s future. In the early 2010s, after years of propagating radical nationalistic ideology, Vučić and SNS presented themselves as pro-European, reading the polls and sensing an opportunity. But after securing power in 2012, Vučić gradually rewrote the script. He is not a thermometer leader, merely reflecting the national mood; he is a thermostat, setting it. The temperature shift was slow but deliberate. By 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vučić took aim at the EU, declaring: “By now, you all understood that European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairy tale on paper.” The fairy tale worked. Today, only 40 per cent of Serbians support EU accession—the lowest enthusiasm in the region.

Meanwhile, Vučić has nurtured alternative alliances. His portrayal of China and Russia as Serbia’s true protectors has yielded tangible results. He has inked deals with Beijing that will severely complicate Serbia’s EU bid—though, with public enthusiasm for the EU at an all-time low, Vučić can now frame his pivot as democratic, a mere reflection of popular will. A recent IRI poll shows that 60 per cent of Serbians identify totalitarian regimes – Russia (46 per cent) or China (14 per cent) – as their most important allies.

Yet the fiction of Vučić the rescuer extends beyond Serbia’s borders. Western policymakers, desperate for a stabilising figure in the Balkans, have bought into his act. Brussels and Washington treat Vučić as a necessary rescuer rather than an autocrat who cracks down on protestors at home while enabling terrorists in Kosovo. If the West truly wants stability, it must stop mistaking Vučić’s self-mythology for reality.

Vučić’s narratives are not harmless fictions. They are designed to consolidate power, discredit opponents, justify alliances with totalitarian regimes, and suppress dissent. They have led Serbia down the path of one-man rule, with Vučić at the centre, spinning the tale. The success of his narrative relies on state-controlled media, an absence of press freedom, and, notably, the indulgence of the West. After years of rewarding Vučić’s destabilising behaviour, the silence from Brussels and Washington D.C. as pro-regime goons assault student protesters demanding accountability for the Novi Sad canopy collapse speaks volumes.

Vučić may believe he is building a stronger Serbia, but history is littered with strongmen (almost always men) who made the same claim, only to leave wreckage behind. In Domanović’s Vođa, the people followed their blind leader to ruin because they placed their trust in his certainty. But Vučić is not blind—he sees exactly where he is leading Serbia. The real question is whether the Serbian people, along with the EU and US, will choose to keep their eyes open or remain captive to the fictions he weaves. Unlike Domanović’s tragic followers, they still have a choice.

Dr. Leon Hartwell is a senior associate at LSE IDEAS, London School of Economics (LSE), a visiting fellow at the European Leadership Network (ELN) in London, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington DC.

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Aleksandar Vučić, Balkans, democratic backslide, protest, Serbia