On his fourth try, Tomislav Nikolic won Serbia's presidential election last week, defeating incumbent Boris Tadic by a narrow margin. Turnout was low. The number of ruined ballots was high. The electoral mechanism appears to have worked smoothly, freely and fairly.
Nikolic's victory in this second round of the presidential election comes on the heels of his party's victory in the parliamentary polls, which gave it the largest number of seats.
A majority of Serbs were fed up with a leadership that had failed to deliver jobs, economic vitality, Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo or sufficient progress in Serbia's efforts to gain membership in the European Union or Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo.
Nikolic is an ethnic nationalist with a history of support to Slobodan Milosevic and close ties to more radical nationalist and war crimes indictee Vojislav Seselj, from whom Nikolic broke in 2008. Accusations that Nikolic committed war crimes in Croatia in the early 1990s have not been taken tocourt, and he won a related defamation suit in 2009.
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