New, appealing nationalist party opens shop (News Feature)

By Boris Babic Oct 22, 2008, 8:59 GMT

Belgrade - The new Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), a splinter of the extremist Serbian Radical Party (SRS), formally opened shop Wednesday on a promise of moderation, European Union membership, and military neutrality, wrapped in national pride.

The former acting chief of the Radicals, Tomislav Nikolic, was elected president of the new party at the founding congress Tuesday night.

His first move was to wash his hands of the belligerent extremist image - which he could not do while in a party that spearheaded extremist policies for Slobodan Milosevic's regime.

The SRS is firmly still led by Vojislav Seselj, who is facing war crimes charges before a United Nations tribunal in The Hague.

'We want ideas to clash in Serbia, not people. We will not have political enemies, but political friends,' Nikolic said, his new vocabulary starkly contrasting the usual slang of the 17 years he spent with the Radicals.

He once publicly referred to a government minister as a 'piece of shit,' and said he did not regret the murder of an opposition journalist and has regularly branded pro-Western politicians 'traitors' and 'servants.'

On Tuesday, addressing several thousand supporters seated in Belgrade's Sava Congressional Centre, Nikolic retained the nationalist rhetoric, but softened and mixed it with pro-European mantras that until recently were the exclusive election-fodder of his rivals.

The SNS wants Serbia in the EU, to be friendly with everybody and to be bridge East and West, 'but with our Kosovo,' Nikolic said.

The Western support for Kosovo - where majority Albanians declared independence from Serbia in February - toppled the previous cabinet, the ruling coalition torn between pro-Europeans and nationalists and remains as a source of tension between Belgrade and western capitals.

On May 11, the SRS again, in a third consecutive poll, won the most votes, but was again shunned by potential partners amid clear signals that the EU would not talk to a government led by extremists.

After the latest flop, Nikolic tried to steer the SRS more energetically than before toward the political centre, but was condemned by Seselj from his cell in The Hague and expelled from SRS.

He was followed by 17 other defectors with seats in parliament, leaving the Radicals with only 60 seats. Many more lower-level officials and activists followed in a split that was bitter, sometimes sealed with fist fights.

Surveys now indicate that Nikolic - as somebody who opposed NATO alongside Milosevic in the war over Kosovo, but who now wants Serbia to join the EU - appeals to many Serbs who are torn between wanting to join Europe and feeling at the same time that Europe has let Serbia down.

The pro-European camp headed by President Boris Tadic's pro-European Democratic Party has a razor-thin, volatile majority of 126 votes in the assembly with 250 seats.

While the emergence of Nikolic's party may have sent the nationalists into panic, it must have also worried Tadic and the Democrats, who won the election on votes against the Radicals rather than by appealing with their own programme.