A student-led protest movement in Serbia rallied more than 100,000 people for a huge peaceful street demonstration on Saturday in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, defying warnings from the country’s embattled strongman leader that months of unrest were careening out of control into violence.
Saturday’s rally, the biggest outpouring of public discontent in Serbia in decades, was preceded by a drumbeat of warnings from President Aleksandar Vucic and his expansive media apparatus that protesters were planning violent attacks to provoke “civil war” and seize power.
Opposition politicians added to a foreboding mood by claiming that they had received information from inside Serbia’s security service of secret plans to arrest Mr. Vucic’s political rivals.
But Saturday’s rally, which began outside the Parliament building in Belgrade and soon engulfed the city center, passed without major incident. Supporters of President Vucic gathered in a park near Parliament and threw stones at students. But fears that the government would deploy war veterans and soccer hooligans linked to organized crime gangs to beat protesters — as it has in the past — did not materialize.
The Belgrade police said the protesters numbered 107,000 while students at Belgrade University’s faculty of dramatic arts, which helped organize the rally, put the turnout at 800,000.
Speaking late Saturday at a news conference, Mr. Vucic described the rally as a “large protest with enormous negative energy toward the authorities.” He said 56 people had been injured, none seriously, and praised his security services for foiling what he said had been plans for violence.
His government, he added, “understood the message” from protesters “and we will have to change ourselves.” While giving no indication of what this change might be, he said “citizens do no want color revolutions,” a term coined by the Kremlin to describe popular uprisings in former Soviet territories like Ukraine.
Apparently mindful of how Ukraine’s former pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, triggered his own downfall in 2014 by using brute force against protesters, Mr. Vucic has so far avoided cracking down violently on students, though there have been a few isolated attacks on them by his supporters.
Asked about a large protest, also on Saturday, in neighboring Hungary against Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Mr. Vucic said the Hungarian and Serbian protests had “the same signature,” a reference to his insistent claims in recent weeks that the West is orchestrating a campaign of unrest to topple populist leaders across the region.
The protests in Serbia, which have spread across the country, reaching into towns that in the past voted heavily for Mr. Vucic, began in November after 15 people were killed by the collapse of a concrete canopy at a newly renovated railway station. Students and opposition politicians — who protested in dramatic fashion last week by setting off flares and smoke bombs in Parliament — have blamed the tragedy on shoddy work by contractors tied to corrupt officials.
While students have focused on a set of clear demands related to the disaster, including the criminal prosecution of those responsible and the dismissal of ministers who oversaw the renovation project, Mr. Vucic’s political opponents in Parliament have demanded that he form a “transitional government” to oversee new elections.
Past elections, held under the supervision of the governing Serbian Progressive Party, have been marred by voter fraud and the government’s control of major television and news media outlets, which allowed it to mostly silence the messaging of opposition candidates. Mr. Vucic has said he is willing to hold an election but has ruled out a “transitional government” that would include his opponents.
As the protests have gathered momentum and attracted support far beyond campuses, which have been barricaded for months, they have increasingly targeted Mr. Vucic, who has been in power for 13 years, with many demonstrators now calling for his removal and even imprisonment.
“Arrest Vucic,” protesters chanted on Saturday. “He’s finished,” read signs carried by some of them.
The political crisis in Serbia, where President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been working on a complicated deal for a Trump-branded luxury hotel in the capital’s center, poses a dilemma for the new U.S. administration.
Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the United States sought to woo Mr. Vucic away from Serbia’s traditionally close partnership with Russia and was criticized by opposition politicians for being too soft on the Serbian president.
The Trump administration shows no sign of tilting away from Mr. Vucic. On Tuesday, Mr. Vucic met the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who was making a previously unannounced visit to Belgrade. The Serbian president, emboldened by President Trump’s dismantling of the aid agency U.S.A.I.D., which had helped finance groups that have documented election fraud and other abuses in Serbia, last month sent armed police to raid the offices in Belgrade of nongovernmental organizations he has blamed for stoking discontent.
