Today’s Autocrat Has No Liberal West to Blame

Spare a thought for the world’s strongmen. The US president is now one of their own and Europe has lost its appetite for democracy promotion, so who can they blame when they come under pressure from protests at home?

Accusing the US, in particular, of fomenting regime change has long been a favorite tactic of authoritarian leaders. At times, those claims have been fully justified. But in recent decades they’ve been mostly bogus. At this juncture, they don’t even make sense.

People have always had agency, as well as goals and expectations of their own, something that authoritarian leaders rarely acknowledge. Absent fair elections, people take to the streets because it becomes their only available route to force political change — and they don’t need the CIA to pay them to do it. This was the case for Ukraine’s Orange and Maidan revolutions, in 2004 and 2014 respectively. It was true of the now-forgotten 2011-2013 Moscow protests, against Vladimir Putin’s subversion of the democratic process as he returned to the presidency. From now on, it should be not only true, but also self-evident.

On Saturday, Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic found himself the target of popular anger over corruption, in the form of the largest public protest the country has ever seen. Hundreds of thousands turned out on the streets of Belgrade. True to form, Vucic said on TV that this was all being orchestrated from abroad, and he would defend Serbia’s independence.

Vucic didn’t name a country, so let’s run through the usual suspects. The US would typically top the list, but it’s now run by Donald Trump, who has zero interest in liberal democracy and likes leaders in Vucic’s mold. In fact, Donald Trump Jr. was in Belgrade this month, working on a proposal by Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners to redevelop the Serbian defense ministry and military-academy buildings — which NATO bombed in 1999 — into a hotel complex.

The project has been approved by Vucic but attacked by his political opponents, who not unreasonably ask whether the US would sign a 99-year lease on West Point for its redevelopment as a hotel, and at that to a company from a foreign country that had bombed it. Trump Jr. even interviewed Vucic on his podcast, sympathizing with him over the protests. So not Trump’s CIA, then.

Europe, meanwhile, is focused on preserving stability in the Balkans at a time when it has quite enough conflict to deal with in Ukraine. Democracy promotion is on a deep backburner. So not the European Union, either. Russia? Certainly not. President Vladimir Putin is an enthusiastic supporter of Vucic.

What about China? Not its style. Besides, the protests began after the November collapse of a cement canopy at the train station in Novi Sad, in the south of the country. Fifteen people were killed. The station had just been rebuilt by a Chinese contractor, as part of the Belt and Road initiative. Serbs suspect corruption and on Wednesday their protests forced Prime Minister Milos Vucevic to resign. In his podcast interview with a Trump Jr, Vucic blamed the protests on the now-defunded US Agency for International Development and other non-profits.

It’s true that non-governmental organizations tend to side against autocrats, because so many focus on strengthening civil society and democracy, or reducing corruption. But that more than 300,000 Serbs would protest because they were manipulated by some western do-gooders is even less plausible than they’re getting paid by the CIA.

“When Vucic says it’s due to foreign influence, we’re all wondering: well, whose?” Vujo Ilic, assistant director of the University of Belgrade’s Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory, told me. The protests are student-led and the main concern among organizers has been about the lack of Western interest in Vucic’s heavy-handed response, which has included smear campaigns against academics, arrests of protesters and the alleged use of a sonic cannon that caused panic in Sunday’s crowd.

To encourage international attention, Ilic helped organize a petition of support from more than 2,000 academics around the world, including Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Piketty, which was released on Thursday.

In Turkey, meanwhile, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has just taken a critical step toward full autocracy by arresting his main political rival, Ekrem Imamoglu. This was done just days before the opposition CHP party was due to confirm the popular Istanbul mayor as its presidential candidate. The government insists the charges are real and unrelated to politics, but that claim is made risible by the fact that just a day earlier, the government had also stripped Imamoglu of his university degree - a requirement to run for the presidency. Protests are banned, but they’re beginning nonetheless.

Erdogan has made a career out of weaponizing suspicion of the West. That doesn’t take much persuasion in Turkey, a country that allied powers tried to carve up among them in 1920. He accused the West of orchestrating the large 2013 Gezi Park protests, as well as a failed military coup in 2016. He blames an international “interest-rate lobby” for conspiring to drive up Turkish borrowing costs.

But after 22 years of rule, Erdogan is in a political bind. A lira meltdown and 70% inflation rates caused by his own unorthodox monetary policies have created a cost-of-living crisis that's eroded his support. Already threatened by Imamoglu’s popularity, he would also need to change the constitution or call an early election to run again.

Erdogan knows Europe will grumble and do little because it needs Turkey and its military industry more than ever as it scrambles for a response to Russian aggression. He also knows he has a kindred spirit in the White House, so he’ll probably get away with his destruction of Turkish democracy without paying an international cost. At home, though, he will have to face an increasingly disgruntled population - and with nobody but himself to blame.