INTERNATIONAL POLICY ANALYSIS Right-Wing Extremism in Serbia JOVO BAKIC February 2013 n During the 1990s the Serbian Radical Party(SRS) was the most important promoter of the far right in Serbia. Slobodan Milošević’s regime managed to keep it under control, thanks to its control over the mass media, although the SRS managed to poll 30 percent of the vote. However, after the political changes of October, 5 th , 2000 (the fall of the Milošević regime) and the former SRS leader Vojislav Šešelj becoming an indictee before the Hague Tribunal(ICTY), the SRS split in 2008. The majority of the party and its supporters turned to the duo Tomislav Nikolić and Aleksandar Vučić, who since then have made successful efforts to pragmatically re-profile the new Serbian Progressive Party(SNP) as a moderately conservative political party. Following the general elections of 2012 the SNP formed a coalition government to­gether with the post-Milošević SPS and Nikolić won last years’ presidential election. n Currently there is no powerful far-right party in Serbia that would unite the far right under one umbrella. This significantly weakens the action potential of the far right. After the defeat of the»old« SRS in the 2012 elections and the SNP’s evolution into a moderate national-conservative party, Serbia today is one of the countries in Europe with no far-right political party in parliament, for the first time since the break-up of former Yugoslavia. n However, there are strong movements at the far right of the political spectrum that despise parliamentarianism and political parties. They strive to bring Serbs back to their alleged roots – albeit Arian in the case of the neo-Nazis, or Serbian orthodox ones in the case of the Obraz group. Working-class youths, usually unemployed and generally not well-educated, serve as their recruiting base, and their activities take place in stadiums and streets where they can insult black football players and get into fights with the fans of opposing teams and the police, knowing full well that corrupt judges will spare them longer sentences even if they commit grave criminal offences. This situation is certainly aggravated by mass unemployment, which cur­rently stands at more than one fourth of the overall population of working age and about 50 percent of people under 30 years of age.