Tensions mount ahead of a pro-government rally in Serbia to counter massive student protests

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) - Tensions mounted in Serbia on Saturday ahead of a major rally in support of populist President Aleksandar Vucic as he pledged to regain control following months of massive anti-corruption protests that have shaken his firm grip on power in the Balkan country.

Vucic has been struggling to quell the nationwide movement led by university students demanding justice for the victims of a train station canopy collapse that killed 16 people in November and which many blamed on alleged widespread graft.

The increasingly authoritarian Serbian government has stepped up a crackdown against critics and independent media, with police questioning students and activists and threatening legal action to curb university strikes.

Authorities have sealed off a central area in the capital Belgrade outside the parliament building, setting up concert stages, tents and food stands for the thousands of nationalist supporters who have been bused in from elsewhere in the country as well as from neighboring Kosovo and Bosnia.

An adjacent park hosting Vucic’s loyalists in front of the presidential palace was encircled with several dozen tractors, apparently in protection of his offices.

As tensions brewed, protesting university students - a key force behind almost daily protests - have urged Belgrade residents to stay away from Vucic’s rally and “use the weekend to rest."

The populist president, who is expected to address the crowd in the evening after all-day events and concerts, has said he will lay out his own demands to restore law and order and restart university classes next week. He has branded the protesting students as "terrorists" who want to destroy the state.

The student-led gatherings have drawn hundreds of thousands of people in an unprecedented challenge to Vucic. On Saturday, students were holding a festive rally in the predominantly Muslim town of Novi Pazar, some 300 kilometers (180 miles) southwest of Belgrade.

Police intervened against students in the town to free an intersection for buses ferrying Vucic’s supporters to Belgrade. Separately, police broke up a blockade of a city transport garage in Novi Sad.

Protesters said public buses were being used for Vucic’s rally while rail and bus services were suspended during anti-government gatherings.

Vucic has trampled on the independence of Serbia’s universities in a campaign that has entered “a phase of open dictatorship," the ProGlas group of prominent individuals, experts, actors and others said.

Vucic is a former extreme nationalist who now says he wants Serbia to join the European Union but has faced accusations of stifling democratic freedoms while maintaining close relations with Russia and China. The president and his allies have claimed that unidentified Western intelligence services were behind the student-led protests with the aim to unseat him from power by staging a so-called "color revolution." He has offered no evidence for such claims.