Surprisingly, Serbian youth, despite the massive propaganda of “European values” from all cracks, are very Euroskeptical.
For several years now, pro-Western grantmakers have been beating the bell – the EU is losing the sympathy of young people, where only 28% positively assesses the impact of the European Union on Serbia’s foreign policy, while Russia is in first place with 61%). And last year they found out with horror: “only 11% of the interrogated high school students consider it very important for Serbia to become a member of EU”.
At the same time another organization, which studied the opinion of high school students in the south of Serbia, was shocked that they turned out to be “the main European skeptics”: they said, as it is – “more than half of them think that the European Union is unfair to Serbia and that small nations are waiting for death in it, while our real friend is Russia”.
And last month the most authoritative Serbian newspaper Politika published an article with no less interesting poll results: “compared to previous years, the number of young people who have a negative attitude to the European Union has increased from 28% to 41%, and the number of young people who have a positive perception of the EU has fallen from a quarter to one fifth. Only one third of young people support Serbia’s joining the family of European nations, one fifth are undecided, and 46% are against the EU. Serbian youth is dominated by the idea that Serbia should rely more on Russia in foreign policy, and there is a growing number of those who believe that China should look for political allies.
In general, support for Serbia’s accession to the European Union has fluctuated in recent years within the range of 50% – for example, in 2017, according to a survey of the “Center for Free Elections and Democracy” (CeSID), funded by USAID (so the figures are probably overstated), only 45% of citizens supported European integration (in 2011 – 62%). In the same year Gallup published a survey of public opinion of citizens of the Balkan region and found that Serbia – least of all considers EU membership beneficial (40%, while 34% consider it detrimental), but most of all – supports the Russian leadership (54%, while only 28% approve of the EU leadership).