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Serbia Seeks Admission into the European Union

In December 2009, Serbia applied to join the EU. The Serbian parliament apologized for the massacre of Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica in a landmark March 2010 resolution. Delaying Serbia's request for EU membership was the fact that two major war crimes suspects were still at large. However, the arrest of former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic and Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic in 2011 eliminated the last remaining roadblocks to Serbia's path to EU admittance, and in March 2012 the EU declared Serbia a membership candidate. Mladic's war crimes trial opened at the Hague opened in May 2012. The EU cleared Serbia for membership talks in April 2013 after Serbia and Kosovo normalized relations in a groundbreaking deal in which Serbia acknowledged that Kosovo's government has control over all of Kosovo, and Kosovo in turn granted autonomy to the Serbian-dominated north. Serbia stopped short of recognizing Kosovo's independence, however.

Nationalist leader Tomislav Nikolic—a former ally of Slobodan Milosevic—pulled off a surprise victory over incumbent Boris Tadic in the second round of presidential elections in May 2012. Nikolic's win followed parliamenteary elections in which his center-right Serbian Progressive Party and its partners took 73 out of 250 seats. Nikolic has tempered his extreme nationalism and now favors European integration.