this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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The estimates for the Belgrade protest go as far as 800k participants.
Serbia has a population of 6.6 million.
A little background info on number of the 1st picture: According to the comments of the Serbian Pic I stole:
-The initial numbers of participants were extremely underrereported (100 K) by Reuters.
-The whole city seemed packed according to witnesses. so all the streets and parks were full with people ( as seen on drone images), he reckoned to add the cities population of 1.5 M to the tally.
-Others said that the other ( smaller) cities & towns seemed empty.
-Therefore, he guesstimated: 1.6 M and counting..
That would mean 90% of Belgrade was in the streets that day. As intense the popular support of the protests is, that number is surely a strech. 800k is already quite mind-boggling by the standards of the country... actually, by the standards of any country.
Edit: "The number of protesters present in Belgrade at the protest is disputed: the official government figure provided by MUP was 107,000, an analysis by the Archive of Public Meetings found there were between 275,000 and 325,000 present "with the possibility that the number was even higher,"[499] and Božo Prelević [sr], the former MUP minister, estimated there were at least half a million protesters.[500]" (Wikipedia)
The Reuters number was simply taken from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MUP), which obviously preferred to keep the number low.
Agreed.
It's at least a very creative stretch from his part to account for his numbers, I could appreciate that. Therefore I found it necessary to shed some light on it, after I saw your input.
And whatever the exact turnout was, it was an incredible inspirational event. Feel bad for the ppl though. About the horrible acts of violence by the Gvment and the use of Sonic booms and such.
It seems like every time that I read Serbia's population number, it's less than the last time. 30 years of population decline must suck for a society.
Yes, it will hurt in the medium term because of the ratio of economically active ones, but overpopulation is bad in the long term.
Czech Republic has been compensating low birth rates with immigration. Maybe the factors that cause few people to migrate to Serbia are larger contributors to the "suck" you've been talking about.
It is not just the dependency ratio. When your population declines enough, you end up having trouble maintaining all sorts of infrastructure. That is especially bad in rural regions. If your population density falls, that means fewer people have to pay to maintain basically the same length of roads, electricity grid, water system and so forth. Fewer customers leads to shops and restaurants closing. With fewer young people, schools will close making even more young people leave, as it makes raising children that much more difficult. So larger villages and small towns tend to do somewhat fine, but villages end up with pretty much no young people and just die. Even worse with an overall population decline the biggest problems of cities, namely the high cost of housing becomes less of a problem.
It really is not just the dependency ratio, which is a problem. In fact that one is often stable, as old people die.