In Serbia, Germans are sometimes referred to as Švabe, from the German Schwaben for natives of the historical Swabia region. It’s rude, but not as rude, say, as the term Kraut used by Britons, an unfortunate reference to the German liking for sauerkraut.
So it was indicative of their closeness that, in February 2023, Serbia’s president referred in public to Jörg Heeskens as moj Švaba, or ‘my Schwaben’.
“I call him my Švaba and he calls me ‘my wild Serb,’” Aleksandar Vucic said during the opening of a factory by the German tyre giant Continental in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad. “That’s how we trade compliments.”
Vucic was thanking Heeskens for his contribution to the deal.
It was the kind of contribution Heeskens is paid to make from German public coffers, but while sitting in the same building as Vucic. And he’s been doing it for 13 years, through various iterations of Vucic’s role in running Serbia - from defence minister to deputy prime minister, prime minister and, since 2017, president of the republic.
As head of state, Vucic should play only a ceremonial role in Serbian public life. That’s what the Serbian constitution requires.
But Vucic has turned the constitution on its head, concentrating power in the office of the president, whether it’s on questions of foreign policy, defence, the economy or ribbon-cutting at a Continental tyre factory.
And none of those projects come bigger than a Rio Tinto lithium mine that Germany has been a powerful supporter of, coveting its output for the batteries needed to power the German car industry’s transition away from fossil fuels.
A trove of official documents from German authorities covering the period 2020-2026, obtained and analysed by BIRN and Der Spiegel over the course of six months, lay bare Germany’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get the mine underway in the face of widespread opposition from ordinary Serbians - and its disregard for Vucic’s subversion of democracy in the interest of getting it done.
At the centre of it all stands 49-year-old Heeskens, a ‘long-term expert’ formally employed by the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, who has Vucic’s ear, a Serbian side gig called Happy Hazelnuts, and an apartment worth at least half a million euros in an upscale, Dubai-style development in Belgrade mired in controversy since the builders first broke ground.
Critics say his years-long shadowing of Vucic reflects a damaging disregard in Berlin for the way Serbian democracy should function.
“The German government is in effect supporting the constitutional abuse Vucic is carrying out by controlling everything,” said Florian Bieber, a professor of Southeast European History and Politics at the University of Graz and who has used the term ‘stabilitocracy’ to describe the West’s support for undemocratic governments in the Balkans irrespective of their disregard for the rule of law and democratic freedoms.
The fact that Heeskens “has moved alongside the president from one office to another shows this was designed as a direct link to a person, not to an institution”, Bieber told BIRN/Der Spiegel.
“I think it is deeply troubling to have a single person funded by Germany sitting in that position, with the explicit purpose of having access to the president.”
Neither Vucic nor Heeskens responded to requests for comment.
Heeskens’s professional engagement in Serbia dates to 2009, when he was appointed as an adviser to Sasa Vucinic, the then mayor of Subotica, a town in northern Serbia.
Vucinic was a member of the Democratic Party, one of a host of parties that clubbed together to help bring down Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 at the end of a decade of lost wars and international isolation. Heeskens was hired as part of a project run by the German Agency for International Cooperation, a state-funded international development body. In 2011, he joined the team behind Serbia’s then economy minister, Mladjan Dinkic.
As a young, hardline nationalist and Serbia’s feared information minister during the 1998-99 Kosovo war, Vucic was part of the Milosevic-era elite brought down in 2000. In 2008, he broke away from the Radical Party, formed the Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, and embraced the goal of European Union accession. In 2012, the SNS entered government, and in September 2013 Heeskens became an adviser to the defence minister – Vucic.
Heeskens was engaged in the role under an agreement between Serbia and the German Ministry for International Development, BMZ, which told BIRN/Der Spiegel he was an “integrated expert” engaged within Serbian government ministries to promote investment and help implement an agreement between the two countries on sustainable growth and employment.
When Vucic became prime minister in 2014, Heeskens went with him. And when Vucic became president in 2017, Heeskens moved again to the New Palace, the seat of the presidency.
