Prime Minister Vučić took his Progressive Party to the Serbian electorate on 24 April (two years before his government’s mandate was up) to gain legitimacy for his plan to join the European Union. It proved a risky manoeuvre – the Progressives lost seats to rightwing nationalist parties and their vote sank below 50 per cent. Still, it left a somewhat a chastened Vučić with enough seats to continue to pursue his pro-European policies, despite widespread discontent due to austerity policies forced on Serbia by the International Monetary Fund as conditions for a $1.35 billion loan, and to the EU’s mistreatment of Greece, a traditional Serbian ally.
The wars of the 1990s and Serbian atrocities still hang over the political class, many of whom are complicit in crimes of that era. Vučić himself was once a hardliner serving as Minister of Information under Slobodan Milošević – who was later brought up on war-crimes charges and died in his jail cell in The Hague. Vučić has since managed to transform himself into a pro-Western modernizer, shedding his old Radical Party rhetoric for the more palatable Progressives. But nationalism is always a lurking force in Serbian politics, with both Milošević’s old Socialists and Radicals forming the main opposition. It all makes for a tricky balancing act for Vučić, who must placate nationalist opinion and the Russians while maintaining his European tilt. To his credit, he has not joined in with the anti-refugee crusade of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which has poisoned much of Eastern Europe.
