Fans of Red Star and Partizan, along with the Serbian Orthodox Church, are the main instrument of the Greater Serbian ideology in the former Yugoslavia.
Four years of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine were marked by rallies of Ukrainians and Russians on February 24th in Belgrade and Novi Sad. Belgrade gathering was followed by a counter rally of the extreme right-wing organization People’s Patrol, which came to support Russian aggression and Vladimir Putin.
A few days earlier, on February 21st, extremist organizations marked the anniversary of the protester’s death at the United States Embassy, which was set on fire following a rally against the declaration of independence of Kosovo in 2008 in Belgrade.
That rally was called by the unregistered extreme right-wing group “Youth 451”, and was attended, among others, by Italian ultra-rightists.
Several blocked social media profiles paid tribute to the deceased Vujović, something that had previously only been done by right-wing organizations. This was interpreted by the public as evidence that the narrative of the authorities and nationalist organizations about an innocent victim has been also accepted by the younger generations, since today’s students were mostly in kindergarten in 2008 and cannot remember those events.
February was “rich” with events that are publicly celebrated by the nationalist extreme right, and so it began with the commemoration of Milan Nedić, the collaborationist Prime Minister of Serbia in World War II. This time, a large number of anti-fascists also showed up, so the police had to separate the two groups, and extremists were detained because they wanted to physically confront them.
Church and stadium
Milos Perović, from the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, who has been studying extremist, neo-Nazi groups, as well as fan and other right-wing organizations for decades, said in his statement for Res Publica that in this region, they have their roots in the late 1980s.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led, says Perović, to an epochal tectonic shift in consciousness in the sense that communism, socialism and all other forms of left-wing ideas in the global context more or less went to the margins of political developments and were systematically suppressed institutionally and non-institutionally, while in Yugoslavia this took particularly dramatic forms.
“Young people are radicalized in school, through socialization channels, and that is the main problem of this society. The channels through which young people access extremist and pro-fascist organizations are, first and foremost, fan groups. Since the very beginning of that fan movement, during the 1980s, we have had connections between those groups and the state security, and that was very understandable during that period because it was a period of preparations for war in the territory of the SFRY. In a way, those fan groups survived in that format and today they are much more significant than they ever were,” says Perović.
He points out that it is precisely the fans of Red Star and Partizan, along with the Serbian Orthodox Church, that are the main instrument of the Greater Serbian ideology in the former Yugoslavia.
“Just as the Serbian Orthodox Church has its temples in Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, so fan groups have their branches in those countries. They are some kind of operational units that spread and reproduce that nationalism since the 1980s until today. Fan groups are the primary channel, although today, with the advent of the Internet, it is much easier for a young person to access such content,” he states.
Telegram, camps, social networks
The Belgrade Center for Security Policy monitors these tendencies, and its analysis of nine extreme right-wing Telegram channels from Serbia conducted during June and July 2025, shows that these actors, although limited in numbers, have a significant influence on the spread of nationalist, pro-Russian and anti-system narratives.
“Extremist Telegram channels in Serbia promote dominantly pro-Russian, anti-Western, and anti-system narratives, creating a closed and polarizing information space,” is one of the conclusions of the research.
It has also been observed that the rapid growth of certain channels often accompanies social and political events such as elections and protests, which, according to the BCSP, demonstrates their ability to mobilize and influence in times of crisis.
The Belgrade Center for Security Policy has conducted many other research and analyses, and one of them shows the government as a dominant anti-systemic extremist force.
Among other things, it was observed that the ruling party practices paramilitary organization of so-called “loyalists” – formations with the characteristics of a secret and paramilitary organization, “made up of criminals, hooligans and extremists loyal to the President of Serbia”, and that there is daily hate speech and systematic violence exercised by the ruling party and its officials against dissenters. There is also a relativization of violence against dissenters and abolition of violent individuals through pardons.
State policy of radicalism
Perović points out that at the beginning of its rule, the SNS tried to be a catch-all party, but that in moments of crisis, when its power is shaken, it “unfailingly returns to its fascist roots.” This should not be surprising, he adds, recalling that the SNS emerged from Vojislav Šešelj’s Serbian Radical Party, which was in fraternal relations with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front – the main fascist party in France.
The pollution of public space with radical, extremist and nationalist messages is best evidenced by the murals of war criminals, primarily Ratko Mladić, as well as the message “When the army returns to Kosovo”, which was painted on hundreds of walls across Serbia in a short period of time. The government publicly defended Mladić’s mural, the then Minister of Internal Affairs Aleksandar Vulin stood out in particular, and police cordons, in conjunction with the previously mentioned People’s Patrols, prevented activists from painting over the mural. There were arrests and prosecutions of activists for throwing eggs at the mural, while the defenders of the mural were not, even though they publicly threatened with violence.
Back in 2023, the Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR Serbia) filed 308 complaints with municipal services in 10 cities and municipalities in Serbia, requesting the removal of murals and graffiti celebrating war criminal Ratko Mladić. Without success.
One of the more graphic examples of government policy is the torture of members and activists of the Krokodil association, who – although it is an association for promotion of culture and literature – have been targeted by right-wingers and extremists of all stripes for years.
After they organized themselves and painted over the graffiti “When the army returns to Kosovo” that was written on the wall near the park where children play every day, they were subject to over 30 misdemeanor charges due to an alleged violation of the Decision on Communal Order in Belgrade.
However, the court ruled that painting over the damage (written with graffiti letters) of the white facade wall with white paint was not a violation. Most of the proceedings ended with acquittals. Interestingly, those who wrote the graffiti were not identified or detained, nor were they able to get fines for violating the municipal order.
A teacher from Niš who painted over the same graffiti drawn on the wall of the “Tasa the Teacher” elementary school was fined 25 euros. At the same time, the SNS publicly condemned his act and labelled the Green-Left Front activists from Niš who participated in the removal of the graffiti as “autochauvinist”.
BEFORE SNS: The Hague and religious education
Right-wing movements were popular even before the SNS came to power, but they were mostly outside the mainstream. In 2011, the Constitutional Court banned the actions of the neo-Nazi “Nacionalni Stroj”, and just one month after the SNS took over power in 2012, the clerofascist “Obraz” was also banned. Both procedures lasted for years.
The authorities, which from 2000 to 2012 were made up of various derivatives of the DOS party that overthrew Slobodan Milošević, despite bans and public rhetoric against extreme right-wing and nationalist organizations, nevertheless took steps that significantly contributed to the radicalization and normalization of nationalism and right-wing ideas, making the right-wing political spectrum acceptable.
What is commonly called the deep state or permanent bureaucracy today, and in Serbia it is domesticated as the BIA or UDBA, has successfully brought under its control, in addition to fan and criminal structures, the entire extreme right, with rare exceptions.
Miloš Perović points out that this process was facilitated by the fact that in the period 2000-2012, right-wingism could be presented to young people as a kind of rebellion. Today, he adds, it is increasingly naked, brutal and transparent than it was then.
“On the one hand, Zoran Đinđić will arrest Slobodan Milošević and extradite him to The Hague, and on the other hand, he will introduce religious education in schools, which is perhaps the main reason why we have such a pious youth in the formal sense, or a growth of clericalism in the society. At that time, we had people in power who declaratively advocated for some kind of Euro-Atlantic integration, that is, for some kind of pro-Western policy, and on the other hand, they go and look for the grave of Draža Mihailović, rehabilitate the Chetnik movement and declare it anti-fascist with parliamentary decrees, and so on,” Perović points out.
Objections to right-wingness
The consequences of the processes Perović is talking about have also been visible during the student protests over the past 15 months. Although students have publicly distanced themselves from certain individuals and organizations over the past year and have banned the display of various flags at their rallies, flags with a map of Kosovo and the message “No surrender”, which are also regularly carried by supporters of the government, have also appeared frequently at student protests.
On the other hand, the degree of clericalization is also shown by student protest marches led by church flags, icons and wooden crosses, which made them look more like processions than protests. A flag that appeared frequently at one point was a flag with the image of the so-called “curly Jesus” that the Russian army uses on the battlefields in Ukraine, and which was also carried by members of the Russian mercenary formation “Wagner”.
This was used to force divisions among students and raise stories about the BIA and Russia taking over the movement, although it is clear that these flags did not appear at most protests, and were conspicuously absent from those gatherings that ended in a brutal police response.
On the other hand, the church, with its support for the authorities and consistent punishment of the few priests who dared to support the students, clearly stated whose side it was on.
Despite everything, the students still went by bike to Strasbourg, including running to Brussels, thus clearly showing that they are aware of their human rights and the rule of law, unlike Russia and its allies.
RUSSIA – camps, training and propaganda
Extremist, far-right, even neo-Nazi and similar organizations are in favour of Russia. On the other hand, state-run Russian media in Serbia support the narrative that the student uprising, which arose as a reaction to the tragic death of 16 people and children under a canopy in Novi Sad, are part of the “color revolution” directed by the West towards the change of government in Serbia. In addition to the anti-Western narrative, Russia also supports the militarization of society in Serbia – during the SNS government, in 2017 and 2018, and then again in 2022, with the existence of Russian training camps for children. Furthermore, thanks to the arrests in Moldova, the existence of Russian training camps for saboteurs who would cause unrest before the elections in that country became known. Some participants in this affair are unequivocally linked to the government in Serbia.
The existence of the Serbian-Russian Humanitarian Center near Niš, which was opened in late April 2012, ten days before the SNS came to power, with the aim of responding to fires, natural disasters and technological breakdowns, is also questionable. Its existence and operations were secret and non-transparent throughout this period, and at the end of last year there were and requests for its shutdown. It is worth recalling that Serbia, although a candidate for membership in the European Union, has not imposed sanctions on Russia for its aggression against Ukraine.
Perović estimates that the perception of Russia among the nationalist part of the public is actually an image of that public, and not what Russia can and is in reality, because, as he states, most of society does not actually know in detail what Russia is, how it works, what the balance of power is, and so on.
“Since 2010, Russia has become significantly stronger and has acquired some kind of status in international relations, and, in fact, the entire calculation of the Serbian extreme right is that in these efforts they could protect Russia, as some kind of new power that appears in global geopolitical relations and which is the protector of what they perceive as Serbia’s national interests,” says our interlocutor.
When everything listed is taken into account, adds Perović, the situation among young people in Serbia is good, compared to how it could be.
