Trump’s towers don’t tend to last. Is Belgrade taking a backwards step?
Thousands of Belgraders marched down Kneza Miloša street last week, banging drums and blowing horns in protest against Donald Trump. The crowd stretched across all six lanes of the avenue as it made its way through the centre of Serbia’s capital.
Those in front carried a banner, bearing the unwieldy but unequivocal slogan, “We will not give away the General Staff building”. It was a message to Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Serbia’s government. The extended Trump family has designs on a prime piece of Belgrade real estate, a ministry of defence complex known as Generalštab, directly opposite the main government building. Kushner’s company, Affinity Partners, plans to build a new development on the site that will include a Trump International hotel.
Serbian MPs gave the project a significant boost earlier this month when they voted in favour of redeveloping the site that has, for decades, enjoyed protected heritage status. This legislation achieved the unlikely feat of bringing together a disparate coalition of opponents, from student activists and architects to military veterans and right-wing nationalists. War veterans view the site as a memorial. (The complex took several direct hits during the 1999 Nato air-strike campaign against the government of Slobodan Milošević.) Architects point out that the buildings are a rare example of surviving work in Serbia by the renowned Yugoslav-era architect Nikola Dobrović. Meanwhile, students and anti-corruption campaigners highlight the lack of transparency surrounding the decision to sign the site over to Affinity Partners for a 99-year period.
But what are they protecting? It is a site that consists of crumbling concrete, shattered windows and twisted metal. The ruins have offered the people of Belgrade a daily reminder of wartime ever since. However, it also provides a warped welcome to visitors of the city, whose route often takes them directly past the bombed-out buildings.
Here lies the positive aspect of Affinity Partners’ interest: it recognises the need to breathe new life into the capital. Three decades on from the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbia is still struggling to move forward, with historical arguments dictating the national narrative. Serbia’s leaders, and its people, vacillate between East and West, with exaggerated nostalgia for a warm, supportive relationship with Russia and a long, potholed path to EU membership.
The state of the Generalštab complex epitomises this indecision. Perhaps the site could be respectfully restored as a tribute to Nikola Dobrović. Or, given its utterly dilapidated state, replaced by something that represents the best of contemporary Serbian architecture.
After all, Trump-branded redevelopments have a track-record that could charitably be described as “chequered”. Take the Trump Ocean Club in Panama, later known as the Trump International Hotel and Tower. Ahead of its opening in 2011, it was a controversy magnet, from Trump’s misleading claims about financing and development to his daughter Ivanka’s inaccurate boast that she had personally sold 40 units at the complex. Within two years, the project was bankrupt; the Trump name was later removed and the hotel rebranded as a JW Marriott. Other examples include: Trump International in Toronto, opened in 2012, rebranded as a St Regis in 2018; and Vancouver’s second-tallest building, which lasted just three years as a Trump International before its closure in 2020, when employees learned that they were out of jobs through media reports. It now operates as the Paradox Hotel. The lesson? Serbia’s government should tread carefully.
The Trump International project is the wrong development for a country that needs infrastructure that can inspire for at least 99 years. It is not too late to harness the controversy to produce something better. To do that, however, Serbia must begin to look forward rather than back.
Guy de Launey is Monocle’s Ljubljana correspondent. Further reading? Monocle caught up with Serbia’s foreign minister, Marko Đurić, who has a Maga hat in his office – read the story here. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
