Bounty of Serbian vaccine diplomacy shames the EU

In a socialist-era concrete hall by the Sava river, Serbia is changing its international reputation one jab after another, and showing that vaccine diplomacy is not just the preserve of global powers.

Last year, president Aleksandar Vucic, who came to power on a pro-EU platform but has cosy relations with Beijing and Moscow, ordered millions of vaccines from both east and west. As a result Serbia is among the first European countries to administer jabs made in China, alongside Russia’s Sputnik V, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna. By mid April, almost 43 doses had been given to every 100 people.

But Serbia also has a vaccine-sceptic population, so while the number of new cases remains high (but falling), Belgrade has chosen to share its bounty. Tens of thousands of people from around the Balkans have lately come to Serbia to get vaccinated.

Many in the region now view Serbia’s vaccine success with gratitude. Yet there is also frustration they had to rely on Belgrade rather than their own governments or the EU. This positioning of Belgrade as a regional capital hearkens back to another era. After the second world war, it was Yugoslavia’s capital and centre of the non-aligned movement — a balancing policy engineered by Marshal Josip Broz Tito to retain cold war neutrality and which helped make the country influential globally.

The Yugoslav project collapsed in the 1990s largely due to Serbian nationalism, which fanned the flames of war in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and later Kosovo, resulting in seven smaller, less influential countries. Many open wounds remain. President Vucic was information minister to Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic during the war in Kosovo, and still refuses to recognise its 2008 declaration of independence. Even so, his vaccine diplomacy has improved relations after long bitterness.

In early March, Vucic personally delivered 10,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Bosnia, after making similar donations to Montenegro and North Macedonia. His government continues to donate doses across the Balkans, while it was only in late March that the EU give Bosnia its first 49,800 doses, procured through the Covax mechanism. “The EU has lost a lot of its soft power,” a former western diplomat living in Belgrade told me.

The programme’s success goes beyond Serbia’s nearest neighbours. I asked a German businessman, awaiting his second jab at a Belgrade vaccination centre, when he might get one in his home country. “Our vaccine rollout is a national embarrassment,” he replied, “especially considering the shot I am getting was invented in Germany”. He expected Germany’s failure to vaccinate its citizens more efficiently would cause a reassessment of its devolved federal system. 

Consensual decision-making and devolved powers are not how Serbia is run. Vucic is the primary decision maker. His Serbian Progressive Party has a supermajority in parliament, and every town or village is governed by his party or one of its satellites. He has made clear that he personally negotiated the purchase of millions of Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccines, decided to procure Russian-made Sputnik V jabs and made bilateral contracts with western companies. Voters perceive him as having savvily balanced east and west.

In offering Beijing and Moscow a European testing ground for their vaccines, before EU regulatory approval, Vucic took a gamble on the safety of his citizens. And while there are worries about relying so heavily on Sinopharm, despite its refusal to release phase 3 trial results and questions over its efficacy, even critics laud his success. That many Serbs can recall the days of heavy handed government also means many do not criticise his autocratic style today.

A woman I met after her first jab mentioned how her mother had reminisced about the country’s last epidemic, a smallpox outbreak in Yugoslavia in 1972. The government organised a vaccination campaign in which almost the entire population of 20m was vaccinated in under two months. “What is this democracy?” the woman’s mother had asked. “Under Tito, 18m people were vaccinated in three weeks! Now that was a system that worked!”

valerie.hopkins@ft.com