The two senior Serbian ruling coalition officials who said they would start hunger strikes to protest what they said was the hooliganism of the opposition said on Friday that they had changed their minds and would postpone their protest.

Defence Minister Aleksandar Vulin said he had decided not to start his hunger strike on Friday following a long talk with “the supreme commander of the Army of Serbia (President) Aleksandar Vucic”. “I am always prepared to fight but the assessment of the supreme commander is that I should be where I am and I will obey, albeit with no great enthusiasm, because this is a man I trust and who Serbia trusts,” the leader of Movement of Socialists told reporters. 

Goran Vesic, the deputy mayor of Belgrade and a ranking official of Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), also decided to postpone his hunger strike but would organize a 24-hour vigil in the Belgrade City Assembly to “keep institutions safe from the hooligans and fascists in the opposition Alliance for Serbia”.    

“We will guard the Belgrade City Assembly and the assemblies of the city’s municipalities to prevent them from being taken over by the hooligans and fascists who have been going wild over the past few weeks,” he told reporters in the city assembly building.  

Vesic accused Alliance official and Dveri leader Bosko Obradovic of planning to break into the Serbian parliament with a group of MPs to start their own hunger strike. “They also planned to break into the Belgrade City Assembly and several municipal assemblies to start hunger strikes and call their followers to join them tomorrow and occupy institutions. What they were planning to do is called a coup d’etat,” Vesic said.