Libertarian Enthusiasts Find Serbia a Hard Sell

"The point is not to force [libertarianism] into Serbian culture but to recognise the elements that are compatible with it here … and then see how those ideas are best adapted to Serbia," Cekarevac, Libek's executive manager, says.

A cross between a club and a think tank, Libek has no ambitions to become a party. It was founded in 2008, while Nikolic, its current president and one of the three founders, was at Belgrade University's School of Political Science.

Nikolic found the atmosphere at the university oversaturated with "leftist, egalitarian, collectivist" ideas.

In 2009 they film a documentary about libertarianism that focused on education, and organised courses on liberalism and against totalitarianism - a catch-all term controversially covering both fascism and socialist governments like Yugoslavia - to draw in like-minded people.

The wider political climate at the time also helped draw in supporters: the public was increasingly disillusioned with Serbia's quick recovery from the effects of Slobodan Milosevic's disastrous reign, which ended in 2000, and the country would soon enter an economic and debt crisis.

Cekerevac, who joined almost at the start in 2008, was drawn to Libek because he found the options on the political scene at that point unsatisfactory.

They ranged between the then nominally socially liberal pro-EU government, which had failed to deliver long-promised prosperity or the rule of law, and the discredited, nationalist parties, with their roots in the 1990s.

Although the power dynamics on Serbia's political scene changed when Aleksandar Vucic's Progressive Party took on the pro-EU reformist mantle, and combined that with their nationalist appeal, Serbian politics has remains heavily polarised,...