It took just 57 days, which by Serbian standards is pretty quick. It’s a strange beast, with Milosevic’s old Socialist party riding shotgun on a coalition of pro-Western liberals and technocrats, but it’s actually less insane than what they had before. In order to make it work, they had to pass a Law [...]

The mostly pro-European Democratic Party (DS) did surprisingly well — possibly because of a surprising last-minute from Brussels to give Serbia a “Stabilization and Association Agreement”. This was fairly blatant intervention on Brussels’ part, but it seems to have worked — at least in terms of getting more votes for DS.
Prime Minister Kostunica’s increasingly [...]

Narrow — it’s about 51%/49% — but sure.
I’ve already posted on what this means. I’ll confess I was half hoping for a Nikolic victory, if only to shake things up; it would have been bad in the short run, but might have opened up new possibilities further along.
A couple of notes below.

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Serbia votes tomorrow. Some observers are casting this as a choice between Good (the EU) and Evil (wicked nationalism). Eh, not really. From the point of view of most Serbian voters, it’s more like a choice between “Not so great, stumbling along, more of the same” and “What the hell, this sucks, [...]

With three days to go before Serbia’s Presidential runoff, Prime Minister Kostunica has announced that he won’t endorse either candidate.
This is a boost to Radical Tomislav Nikolic — in the final Presidential debate last night, he thanked Kostunica for not taking a side — and a rather large slap in the face to incumbent Boris [...]

“Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain.” — Schiller
So Serbia’s government has agreed to sell its oil and gas company, NIS, to Russia’s Gazprom.
By itself there’s nothing wrong with this. What’s stupid about it is the price. NIS has a market value of around $2.8 billion. The government is selling it [...]

Apparently the Dutch have said they won’t approve Serbia’s Stability and Association agreement unless Serbia comes up with suspected war criminal Ratko Mladic.
This comes from the excellent B92 site:
Holland will not let Serbia sign the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) until Ratko Mladić is transferred to the Hague [said] Dutch European Affairs Minister Frans Timmermans… [...]

This weekend’s election results in Serbia, and in particular the gridlock state of the political process and the resilience of the vote for the nationalist Serbian Radical Party (as ably explained by Doug in the previous post), pose new, and arguably reasonably urgent questions for all those who are concerned about the future of those [...]

If you’re ever in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, you’ll want to swing by the Government building.
(It’s called the Government building because, well, that’s where the government is. The Parliament, the Prime Minister, the President, and half a dozen or so government agencies are all squashed into one huge building downtown. It’s sort of [...]

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. AP quotes the commander of EU peacekeepers in Bosnia saying “the net is closing in” on the two men responsible for the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.
Nice, except that’s followed up by the dumbest quote I’ve seen this morning (it’s early yet): [...]