Vojislav Kostunica

Vojislav Kostunica was the candidate who beat Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, precisely because he was a nationalist that no one could accuse of serving the West. He was a constitutional lawyer, dismissed from Belgrade University in 1974 for defending a colleague purged over a text critical of the Yugoslav constitution, and he spent the next fifteen years translating The Federalist Papers and writing on party pluralism. He founded the Democratic Party with Zoran Djindjic and then split from it, taking a harder line on Serb national questions and a colder one on the Hague tribunal, which he regarded as politically directed. That combination made him the only opposition figure Milosevic's propaganda could not portray as a foreign agent, and Djindjic - the far better organiser and the more compromised candidate - built the coalition around him. He won the election of September 2000, the results were annulled, and the general strike and the storming of the federal parliament on 5 October ended the regime. He was president of the rump Yugoslavia until 2003 and prime minister of Serbia from 2004 to 2008. He and Djindjic governed in open hostility to each other until Djindjic was assassinated. His premiership was defined by resisting Kosovo's independence, which was declared anyway in 2008, and by a slow and grudging cooperation with the tribunal; Radovan Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade under his government. He left office in 2008, opposed the EU accession path, and withdrew from active politics in 2014. He is a translator of political theory as well as a politician and lived modestly, which was noted at the time. He had no children. Serbia formally applied for EU membership in 2009, the year after he left office.

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