Boris Tadic has won Serbia’s Presidential elections, defeating the populist Radical Tomislav Nikolic by a close but clear margin on a high turn-out.

Nikolic has conceded defeat in a dignified way. Tadic is making suitably polite noises about his opponent and his supporters.

This is a powerful vote by Serbia for a normal ‘European’ future. Nikolic campaigned hard on a defiant ‘We’re Keeping Kosovo’ platform seemingly positioning Serbia equi-distant between the EU and Russia. That geographically and philosophically confused notion of course had resonance among voters fed up of feeling that Serbia is always being kicked around by the international community and/or recalling the heady days of Titoist ‘non-alignment’.

But a majority of Serbs evidently concluded that after the battering their country had had over the past two decades or so (not to mention the previous seven centuries), the Nikolic option was too risky and would go nowhere. Plus Serbs don’t trust Russians much anyway; the hope of visa-free travel to the EU is much more appealing in Belgrade than the metaphysics of Slavic solidarity. .

In any case, as former Serbia and Montenegro former Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic has rightly pointed out, those who voted for Nikolic generally were not primitive morons but people who in many ways for good reason were frustrated by the turn of events in the past seven years since Milosevic fell.

Boris Tadic is a fine, reasonable, honourable 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. Cestitam.