

Protesters wave Serbian flags during a protest walk in Belgrade on April 13. Photo: EPA-EFE/ANDREJ CUKIC

After fact-checking statements that followed a recent ruling party rally held by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in the northern city of Novi Sad and an anti-government protest in Belgrade two days later, it is clear that ruling party officials resorted to false claims about the numbers attending the two events.

Officials have called the Novi Sad event “the biggest rally ever”.

Meanwhile an official said of the opposition rally: “The police assessment is between 7,300 and 7,500 participants.”

Both these statements about the two events turned out to be incorrect.

The first rally was for supporters of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party on April 11 in Novi Sad, where people gathered for the ‘Future of Serbia’ event organised by President Vucic.

The second followed two days later, on April 13, when opposition supporters gathered in front of parliament in Belgrade for what was billed as the biggest opposition gathering since last December, when the first in the current series of weekly protests took place.

Pro-government media claimed that 35,000 to 40,000 people attended the Vucic rally in Novi Sad, while they and the police said that only about 7,500 people attended the later rally organised by the opposition.

Ruling party officials also claimed there was no organised transport to Vucic’s Novi Sad event, while the opposition claimed that a two-hour internet shutdown during their protest was ordered by the government.

BIRN fact-checked what has been said about both events and how it looked on the ground.

Sharply differing numbers

When it comes to the opposition protest, BIRN journalists used photos and videos from different media and social media users and compared them with estimates from the fact-checking platform Mapchecking.com.

Mapchecking.com is a tool that provides the maximum number of people that can fit a certain area by marking streets or squares and choosing the density of people per square metre.

After comparing photos and videos from the protest held in front of the Serbian parliament, BIRN journalists divided the space where the protesters gathered into three areas – people in front of the National Assembly (with higher density – two persons per square metre), the park area in front of the parliament (lower density – one person per square metre), and the Nikola Pasic Square area by the park opposite the National Assembly (one person per square metre).

By taking account of the densities of different parts of the crowd, the Mapchecking.com tool estimated that around 40,000 people attended the rally.

National Assembly area - We marked the area surrounding the stage with the avarage density of 2 persons/m2. The maximum number of people is 26,795.

However, the total number of people attending the six-hour protest was probably larger than that, as some people clearly joined the event as others left during the march through the city centre. The organisers did not give their own estimate, but speakers at the rally made claims that ranged from 35,000 to 100,000 people.

When it comes to the Progressive Party event in Novi Sad, figures also vary between the official estimate and the fact-checked version.

Pro-government media maintained that more than 35,000 people turned up to support the government in the centre of Novi Sad.

But Mapchecking.com showed that the main square filled with people in Novi Sad could not have held more than 20,000 people, bearing in mind that the square is surrounded by buildings.

To create a more accurate estimate of attendance, BIRN journalists divided the protest into three areas – the square where the stage was and Zmaj Jovina Street, both with a density of 2.5 persons per square metre and Modene Street, with two persons per square metre.

No organised transport?

President Vucic insisted that there was no organised transport to the pro-government rally in Novi Sad. “No one from central Serbia and Kosovo and Metohija will come to Novi Sad. Maybe one man. There is no organised arrival [of people],” Vucic said on April 10, ahead of the event.

But pictures widely shared on social networks showed long lines of buses arriving from all parts of Serbia, including from the central part of the country.

People interviewed by N1 television station the same day also said there was organised transport to Novi Sad.

Why the internet failed at the opposition rally

At the beginning of the opposition protest in Belgrade on April 13, the internet signal dropped so that people attending the event, together with the media, were left without any internet connection. This sparked allegations that the government had intervened to cut it off.

One opposition politician, Sergej Trifunovic, joked that he alone had internet access. “Nobody has internet except me; it is because the firstborn [Vucic] likes to read my tweets,” he jested.

But Andrej Petrovski, an IT expert, told BIRN that there could be a simple explanation for the outage.

He explained that all three of the country’s mobile operators in the area use the same base stations.

“Because of the large number of people with mobile devices connected to the same base stations in that area, the network became overloaded,” Petrovski said.

He said that the amount of people connected to the base stations at the same time overwhelmed the capacities of the base stations.