Reflections on Authoritarian Times

Serbia is often defined as a hybrid democracy or partocracy, with the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) composed of 700,000 members in a country with a population of over six and a half million. A semi-peripheral, non-EU European country under the uncontested power of its president, Aleksandar Vučić, it is also described as stabilitocracy: a type of government that claims to “secure stability, pretends to espouse EU integration and relies on informal, clientelist structures, control of the media, and the regular production of crises to undermine democracy and the rule of law.”