ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that populism is the baseline for the main parties in Serbia, which have a strong tendency towards instrumentalizing territorially-based ethno-nationalism as a situational reaction to the political agendas of Serbia’s ethnic minorities. It presents an analytical framework for interpreting the logic of Serbian party populism and its relation to territorial disputes. Party pluralism was institutionalized by the Serbian constitution in 1989 and Serbia has had a dynamic party landscape ever since, offering nuanced alternatives to established political positions. The chapter demonstrates the partial paradox that processes of democratization allowed populism to thrive in Serbia through their strategies of redefining the concepts of “the people” and “the elites”. Serbian populist parties have sought to generate an ideological discourse that takes the fact of ethnic heterogeneity and transforms it into a claim that Serbia is an ethnically divided society in order to lend legitimacy to nationalist mobilization strategies.
