In a result unexpected by me at least (I am not following Serbia’s goings-on too closely these days, and the polls suggested that Tadic would win again) Tomislav Nikolic as leader of the Serbian Progressive Party has won Serbia’s Presidential Elections today by a clear nose, ousting former President Boris Tadic.

Serbia has some 6,700,000 voters. Less than half of them voted in this second-round run-off. Nikolic has won with some 1,500,000 votes, ie just over 50% of those who voted and well less than 25% of total voters overall. Tadic has conceded, on a total of 1,490,000 – a miserable result given his 2,300,000 votes in 2008.

Here is my piece from 2008 when Tadic defeated Nikolic last time round:

Boris Tadic is a fine, reasonable, honorable European-style leader, with hunky shoulders from his water-polo days. He will need to draw on all his reserves of physical and political strength to deal with the looming drama of a Kosovo declaration of independence.

A win for the nationalist Nikolic would have made the Kosovo Albanians’ immediate ambitions far easier presentationally. Tadic’s new mandate perhaps will incline leaders round Europe and beyond to be rather more cautious about dumping an explosive Kosovo problem in his lap as his elections victory gift.

I used obnoxiously to opine that when Serbs were confronted with a clear choice between (a) taking a positive, optimistic, steady path to likely success, and (b) a thorny, barren, twisting road probably heading for yet another Disaster, they would ask for an extended time-out to think about it.

This time they chose promptly – and chose well.

Well, in 2012 they have chosen differently.

Nikolic is a typical bluff old-style Serbian opportunist who has meandered round the hard-core end of the conservative/nationalist political spectrum and ended up as a supposedly moderate ‘centrist’ making ‘social’ noises tolerable in polite European society. Latterly he has been helped in that fine direction by engaging my former US Ambassador colleague Bill Montgomery as a communications consultant.

That said, where you come from makes a difference to what you are now. Nikolic for most of his career has hung around with Serb nationalist Slavophiliacs and made countless truculent statements in favour of ‘Greater Serbia’, even at one point calling for Serbia to join Russia and Belarus in a new political union haha.

In 2008 he broke noisily with war crimes indictee and Radicals leader Vojislav Seselj (no doubt in good part because Nikolic saw that Serbia was edging towards EU membership and that that was the smart way to bet). Latterly he has campaigned on a pious if improbable anti-corruption line, playing on the frustration of many Serbs that the Democratic Party tradition of assassinated former PM Zoran Djindjic (and Tadic) had got too greedy in office but (worse) was not delivering economic progress.

The main result of Nikolic winning office is that there is no chance of an early settlement of the Kosovo problem, not that there had been much of a chance had Tadic won.

Nikolic will feel happier chatting to chortling Russians in Moscow than to peevish EU leaders in Brussels, although he will try hard to assert some sort of surface ‘non-alignment’. He already this evening is saying blandly that Serbia will continue down its European road.

Moscow is happy to let the Kosovo problem fester, if only because the Russians think that most Western governments have made a fool of themselves by accepting Kosovo independence and like watching the issue twist in the breeze. And with events in Greece moving in a more confusing direction as the Eurozone screams in pain, the blandishments of ‘Orthodox solidarity’ across the region as defined by Mother Russia will smoothly re-emerge.

This result poses a problem for the Kosovo leadership. To press ever harder to assert control over the remaining Serb-dominated areas of Kosovo in the north, perhaps provoking an open confrontation with Belgrade now led by someone who may have less of a problem behaving aggressively to defend Serbia’s position? Or start to think about cutting a dirty deal on partition?

All in all, is Nikolic’s election more a clear change of emphasis and style in a conservative old-style socialist direction rather than a dramatic lurch in an explicitly nationalist neo-Milosevicist direction? Maybe. There is likely to be some sort of ‘co-habitation’ with Tadic’s party in Parliament anyway. Serbia’s political elite is small – the jobs move to and fro between a fairly tiny number of people whatever the demoralised voters want, one reason why the turn-out was so low this time.

However, it is hard to see even Bill Montgomery persuading Nikolic to take the steps needed to cut Serbia’s constipated post-Yugo-socialist state processes and boost the economy. And those Serbs in Serbia and Republika Srpska who argue that the current arrangement of countries in the region is unstable and unworkable will feel empowered. I can’t see Serbia being much better off in four years’ time as old-style thinking and old-style people swagger back into prominence, even if they are wearing smarter European trousers to impress us all.

The EU in Brussels will now have to take a deep breath and decide how best to play its hand. Hang tough on Belgrade while the Kosovo issue drags on? Or call Nikolic’s bluff and accelerate moves to integrate Serbia towards EU processes as the best chance of keeping things under control?

Or heave a sigh and decide not to spend much time on the whole sorry stagnant region while the whole EU project is in such a sorry state? Much to Moscow’s cynical amusement.

Sve i svasta na Balkanu…