Serbian PM Ana Brnabic, who is openly gay, was nominated for the position by President Aleksandar Vucic, leader of the nationalist conservative SNS. Predrag Milosavljevic/Xinhua News Agency/PA Images. All rights reserved.The last few years have witnessed the domination of Serbia’s and Croatia’s political landscapes by two, nominally, conservative parties of the centre-right: the Serbian Progressive Party-SNS and the Croatian Democratic Community-HDZ.
Despite their shared Yugoslav heritage, the evolutionary trajectories of these two parties into prevalent political actors are qualitatively different. The main questions here are: How did the SNS and the HDZ come to dominate Serbia’s and Croatia’s political spectrums? What does this tell us about the outlooks of these two parties towards the EU?
SNS: reformation as de-radicalization
On 24 February 2003, the Serbian Radical Party-SRS leader, Vojislav Sešelj, surrendered himself to the ICTY. Although he officially retained party-leader status, the actual administration passed into the hands of Tomislav Nikolić; one of Sešelj’s most trusted associates.
