Vojislav Šešelj

A former indictee of the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Vojislav Šešelj returned to Serbia in 2014 (he was acquitted in a first-instance verdict on all counts by the ICTY pending appeal in 2016) and quickly brought his far-right Srpska radikalna stranka back to the Serbian Parliament. He is seen by some voters and some fellow opposition candidates as the favoured challenger to Aleksandar Vučić because he never criticizes the Prime Minister, as was the case during the days of Slobodan Milošević. When he speaks against the government in public, he tends to reserve his strongest criticisms for his ex-ally and former friend Tomislav Nikolić, the outgoing President.

His chauvinist and nationalist position appears to be much as it was in the 1990's, challenging Serbia’s neighbours and claiming that the current political borders need to change. He publicly burned Croatian, European and American flags at a square in Belgrade in March of 2016.

Šešelj is emphatically anti-European and anti-NATO. He describes himself a promoter of Russian politics in Belgrade and says that the only viable option for Serbia is to be as close to Moscow as possible.