Price of resistance to reforms paid for too long

BELGRADE - Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has said that due to resistance to reforms and changes, Serbia had for too long been a country without clear rules and without awareness of how important they are.

In an opinion piece for the 80th anniversary edition of the Belgrade-based weekly NIN, the prime minister underlines that the reforms are a way to introduce rules into Serbia, the same ones that enable normal and effective progress in the developed world.

And Serbia had for too long been a country without clear rules and without awareness how important they are, he says.

As a consequence, we had tycoons and we were robbed in the so-called privatization process, and a new class of partocrats was created, and an army of the socially corrupt who see any change as a stab in the back and a threat to their very survival, he notes.

"It is that very resistance, the resistance to reforms and changes, that resorted to bullets to stop the people who wanted to change things for the better in both 19th and early 21th century," Vucic notes.

"Just to be clear, I am not afraid of meeting a similar end, I just mentioned this to illustrate how great the opposition to every attempt to reform Serbia, its economy, and its mindset has always been," the prime minister says.

Vucic says that by abandoning every attempt to reform Serbia, others annulled everything that Prince Mihailo Obrenovic and prime minister Zoran Djindjic, his political opponent at that time, tried to do.

"They left a void to be filled, and we began doing that in 2014," Vucic says.

As the linchpin of the reform process, Vucic points to work as a driving force of any national development.

"To me, reforms boil down to a dream about a...