Andre Marotto is the national director at TeachBeyond Serbia. He says the subway tragedy ignited a backlog of frustration over increasing government control.

“Being a former socialist [country], the majority of telecommunication institutions, TV channels, have been still kind of controlled by the state,” he said. “The government has worked at length to secure their sphere of influence within major state-owned companies. The level of dissatisfaction, especially among business people, [with] the way the government has been working had been growing for many years.”

February 2025 protest walk in Čačak, Serbia (Photo courtesy of Dejan Krsmanovic via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

At first, demonstrations were politically neutral and peaceful. Marotto says that out of almost 200 cities in Serbia, 80 to 90% of the cities have joined those protests.

“We had probably the largest protest in Serbia in March, with about 350,000 people,” Marotto said. Now in August, the number of daily protesters has decreased, “but it’s still sizeable,” he said.

“So many of the kind of good tricks in the ‘school book’ of how governments should handle protests have been tried and used,” Marotto explained. “In the last couple of months, the government has been more active in terms of repressing with some level of brutality, trying to dissuade people from coming to the streets.”

Students continue to protest at a high personal cost. Marotto explained that universities and schools have been on strike since November last year, since most of the protests are led by students. “Thousands of students have missed a whole or at least half of an academic year,” he said.

Since Serbia’s constitution does not allow for religious schools, TeachBeyond Serbia can offer Christ-centered education only through informal projects. These projects might involve English camps or other activities connected to language learning, working alongside local partners.

“We’ve had a few partners that we have been working [with] faithfully. That’s just good to see that God is opening doors for us to serve the local Christian community,” said Marotto. 

In the protests, pray for peaceful political change, but most importantly pray for revival! 

“We are also within a particular context, which is southeastern Europe and eastern Europe. [In] the whole European context, Christianity has been largely on decline in this continent,” Marotto said. 

Learn more about TeachBeyond here. 

Header photo: Belgrade on the eve of the March 15, 2025 protest (Photo courtesy of Emilija Knezevic via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)