ABSTRACT
Serbia became independent from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. Serbia uses a party list proportional representation electoral system with the d’Hondt method, with the entire country serving as one constituency. Throughout the autocratic 1990s Serbian politics was dominated by the socialist party of Serbia, founded in 1990 and led for almost all of the decade by Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia from 1989 to 1997, when he became the president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Serbia has various ethnic minority parties; of those that run alone the largest is the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians, founded in 1994. In the 2000 transitional election the democratic opposition of Serbia alliance won an overwhelming majority. Serbia has a couple conservative and monarchist parties that in the 1990s and 2000s had some success. The main parties in Serbia usually run in electoral alliances of several parties, most of which wind up in cabinet.
