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Serbia Election - 6 May 2012

In voting on May 7th, 2012, Serbia's incumbent president, Boris Tadic, finished first in his bid for re-election, but fell far short of a majority, so a runoff vote would be held in two weeks. Tadic and his main challenger, Tomislav Nikolic of the nationalist Serbian Progressive Party, finished first and second in a field of 12 candidates. Together they won more than half of nearly four million ballots that were cast, and Serbia's Election Commission said Tadic has a 13,100-vote lead over Mr. Nikolic. In the final count of ballots in the run-off, Nikolic won nearly 50 percent of the vote while Tadic won more than 47 percent. Fewer than 50 percent of the voters came out to the polls.

Nikolic was a longtime member of the far-right nationalist Serbian Radical Party, whose former head Vojislav Seselj was on trial in The Hague on charges of war crimes during the Bosnian conflicts of the 1990s. He tried to shed his conservative image in recent years and present himself as a democratic leader. In the presidential run-off on 20 May 2012, Nikolic defeated outgoing president Tadic. In 2008, Mr. Nikolic ran for president on a nationalist pro-Russian and anti-EU platform. But in October that year he and followers from the moderate wing of the Serb Radical Party (SRS, which had taken 78 seats in the 2008 elections) left to form the SPP. The SPP has pledged to pursue the European path, while maintaining strong ties with Russia.

On May 24th, 2012 Serbia's President-elect Tomislav Nikolic resigned from his Serb Progressive Party, saying he wanted to be the leader of all Serbian citizens. The conservative politician was seen as a pro-Russian leader, but he told an European Union delegation that his first priority is to lead his country toward integration with the bloc.

In voting for parliament, Nikolic's nationalists won 73 seats, ahead of Tadic's Democratic Party bloc, which won 67 seats. Since Serbia's opposition socialists won 44 seats, the party once led by Slobodan Milosevic appeared to hold the balance of power in talks on forming a new government. Serbia's parliament voted on 27 July 2012 for a new nationalist-led coalition government headed by Ivica Dacic, the former spokesman for the late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. Prime Minister Dacic was sworn in, marking the first time socialists have gained control of the Belgrade government since Milosevic was ousted in 2000 near the end of the Balkan wars. Dacic, who railed against the West while a part of the Milosevic regime, has since embraced a reformist agenda and says his coalition will continue to pursue membership in the European Union.

Parliament approved the Dacic cabinet by a 142-72 margin, ending nearly three months of political uncertainty that followed national elections in early May. Dacic's coalition includes lawmakers from his Socialist Party and ministers from the nationalist Progressive Party of President Tomislav Nikolic, along with several smaller parties. The government was reconstructed on 2 September 2013.