Last week, Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vucic took the unusual step of addressing Western audiences directly. Letters to the Financial Times and The Guardian, and interviews with Euronews and the New York Post, form part of a counter-offensive against hyperbolic portrayals of his country as sliding into outright authoritarianism.

The backdrop is a season of unrest. Protests have gripped Serbia for over nine months — largely peaceful until mid-August, when they turned violent. Demonstrators set fire to ruling party offices and clashed with police. Journalists documented incidents of police brutality, minors detained and foreigners held in garages with their phones destroyed. The government’s response — denouncing the protests as a “colour revolution” and branding participants “hooligans” and “terrorists” — inflamed tensions rather than calming them.

Yet Serbia is not Belarus. Vucic is not Lukashenko 2.0. His regime retains the trappings of democracy. Opposition parties compete in elections, however uneven the field. Independent media outlets still operate, often with sharp criticism for the president. At demonstrations and football matches, chants of “peder” — a homophobic slur directed at Vucic — are heard without consequence. Months of unauthorised rallies were tolerated without police intervention before violence broke out. This is not the machinery of an authoritarian state.

Vucic makes precisely this point in his letters. In the Guardian, he reminded readers that “over the past nine months, Serbia has experienced more than 23,000 unauthorised rallies … despite this, police actions have remained limited and restrained.” Initial student demands, he wrote, were met: “We opened investigations, released thousands of documents … boosted education funding, and the prime minister resigned.” He concluded: “Serbia is a democracy. It will hold elections before the 2027 deadline … What Serbia cannot accept is violence disguised as activism.”

In the FT, he struck a similar note: “The government remains committed to dialogue, stability and reforms that strengthen democratic institutions.” To Euronews, he stressed his willingness to debate: “This was not my first call. Actually, it was my fifth or sixth call for a dialogue … I offered them an open TV debate. They can pick the premise, they can pick the studio.” He praised alleged police restraint: “It’s a miracle that, having in mind the aggressiveness of protesters, we kept the situation in a way that there were no casualties.”

Such defences sit uneasily with the pattern of politics under the SNS. Serbia’s democracy is not abolished but hollowed out — undermined not by mass repression but through subtler means: control of resources, selective policing and pressure on the media.

A recent scandal illustrates this. On August 27, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and KRIK, an investigative outlet in Serbia, published an audio recording of a private conversation between Telekom Srbija’s director Vladimir Lucic and United Group’s Stan Miller. It suggests top media executives are colluding with the regime to weaken independent outlets.

The recording begins with Miller stating that “Serbia is exploding underneath our asses.” He suggested Vucic had personally requested the removal of Aleksandra Subotic, head of United Media, which owns independent outlets N1, Nova, Danas and Radar. “I cannot fire Aleksandra today as we discussed, okay?”

“I understand that the president called you and is very upset,” Miller continued. Before replacing her, however, he said he must first “make that company very small in Serbia, if you understand what I mean.” When challenged on the matter, Vucic was defiant: “If I wanted to shut them down, we would shut them down.”

The incident underlines how competition is tilted. Serbia retains independent media, but their survival is precarious. Elections are held, but not fought on equal terms. The police may not butcher protesters, but arrests and beatings on camera have become routine. Democracy remains in form, but frays in substance.

Why the sudden charm offensive abroad? Partly, it is domestic theatre. Vucic’s letters allow him to frame unrest before an international audience, while feeding into the local narrative: a leader embattled, misrepresented abroad, defending his country’s dignity. They also serve a strategic purpose, to reassure investors and Western partners. Despite criticism, foreign governments continue to see Vucic as a stabiliser in a volatile region. Brussels is not about to risk destabilising Belgrade when Bosnia & Herzegovina teeters on the edge.

Economically, however, the picture is less stable. Investor confidence has faltered, growth prospects are weakening and corruption scandals gnaw at the government’s reputation. The SNS’s promise of stability and prosperity, once its strongest card, is fraying.

Serbia today is neither a dictatorship nor a healthy democracy. It sits in between: elections without full fairness, media without full freedom, opposition without full opportunity. Vucic’s critics call this authoritarianism. I’d call it a flawed democracy, one in which democratic norms have steadily been eroded.

The danger is not that Serbia becomes Belarus, but that it remains trapped in this in-between space — too authoritarian to satisfy its citizens, too democratic to collapse outright. Unless tensions ease, the country may face years of low-level unrest and political stalemate, a fragile equilibrium sustained by Western tolerance and domestic exhaustion with the lack of a real alternative.