Dejan Stojadinovic vs Velja Ilic: Is it ok to punch a politician on sight?

So—is it? But what if we’re not talking about a theoretical politician but about an ultraconservative right-wing chauvinistic tycoon-politician who kicks journalists and threatens people?

Velimir Velja Ilic, the beaten party in the video is perhaps the best known representative of its kind in Serbia, but among the politicians and the political parties here, the difference between the most corrupt and the least corrupt is only in the authority they have at any given moment and the amount of power they are able to misuse. The person giving the precise blow to Ilic’s head is Dejan Stojadinovic, a nobody – a true representative of the people, the un-politician, a man with no connections, no power and no money. According to Dejan’s facebook profile, some minutes before delivering his “protest note” to Velimir Ilic, he was informed that he can’t get a passport because of some bureaucracy issue. In the video, just before mr Ilic makes his sad smiley face you can hear the people’s representative saying the now infamous quote “Sve ste vi ista banda” – You [politicians] are all the same gang. This sentence summarizes the Serbian general public’s feeling towards politicians perfectly. The biggest party in Serbia is comprised of those who refuse to vote, and in a country where nearly everyone and their mother-in-law have their own political opinion on every topic imaginable, it’s a sure sign that something’s wrong. At the top, the corruption is biggest because it’s legal.

At the same time, the economic situation is getting critical. The average salary may be ca 380 Euros per month, but the stats can be fooling. While the tiny group of politicians and their friends are making a killing, a huge chunk of the working population recieves only 150 Euros per month after working eight hours a day, six days a week – basically that means they are making around 75 eurocents per hour. Lately there has been workers’ protests and rumors that the situation is really becoming not only critical but Argentina-type critical.

This is also why Serbian politicians have security guards – not to protect them from a deranged, mentally unstable random attacker or a paid assasin, although those are also good reasons – no, the biggest threat to a Serbian politician’s head these days comes from your average Joe.

Tagged as: crazy, crisis, politicians, recession, street, transition