A few days ago, taking advantage of the twenty seconds we shared in an elevator, a reader thanked me for recommending a novel. Since getting it right is the pleasure of a columnist, I'll try it again today with a short and clear book. It's not fiction, unfortunately, because it performs the brilliant yet troubling exercise of taking Mussolini's fascism and placing today's populist far-right on top of it. The result is a carbon copy, a word-for-word transposition of the simplicity, fear, hatred, and violence of a type of people who ask us for our vote.

The image of the Saturday evening demonstration in Belgrade, with tens of thousands of mobile phone flashlights lit, was the living (and familiar) image of those who can't take it anymore. It all began in November with the death of 15 people when the roof of a recently renovated station collapsed on them. The almost daily protests against corruption and bad governance have continued since then and erupted peacefully on Saturday.