Political usage of the football fan groups’ homophobia at the pride parades

Abstract

The paper presents the football fan groups? homophobia, short history of the Pride parades and the ways in which leading politicians used it during the last two decades. Parades were mainly either violently disrupted or canceled out of security reasons because state was not capable to guarantee right to peaceful public meetings. However, Parades took regularly place after 2014, although homophobia was equally strong among football fans and equally widespread in society. Did Serbia become a Rechtsstaat after 2014 or should one look for answers at some other place? The answer is twofold: the Vucic regime needs legitimation before the EU, and it has special relations with football fan tribes. Some of the leaders of football fans ?delije? founded firms as late as 2015, and the first safe Pride parade was held that year, by means of which they made money laundering and enormeously enriched themselves in deals with the state firms. The Vucic regime used some other football fan leaders, assembled from various football fan tribes, to form a new football fan tribe ?janjicari? in order to control disobedient ?grobari (Grave diggers). There are serious indications that some members of the Vucic family are involved in business-criminal-football fan connections (Cvijic, 2022; Dojcinovic, Vojinovic, 2022; Markovic, 2021; Nesic, 2021; Dojcinovic et al., 2020; Georgiev, 2020; Dojcinovic, Pavlovic, 2019; Milivojevic, 2019; Pavlovic, Vojinovic, 2018). Therefore, the Rechtsstaat has not been established, but a symbiosis between the organised crime and authoritarian regime. That is why right protection of the LGBTI persons is insecure in the future, and it has already been clearly shown before the next Euopride that should be held in Belgrade in September 2022.