Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning, quipped Churchill in November 1942, following Montgomery’s modest success at El Alamein. The same applies to Tomislav Nikolic’s victory in the second round of Serbia’s presidential election last Sunday.

The defeat of Boris Tadic—amply and inappropriately assisted in the final stages of his campaign by the unspeakable, greasy-haired, gay-pride-marching U.S. ambassadress Mary Worlick—is certainly not the end of the global-imperial lethal grip on Serbia. It is to be hoped that is heralds the beginning of its end, but it certainly is the end of the “pro-Western” regime’s four-year-long exercise in self-abasement abroad and ruthless robbery at home.

The robbery included the regime’s theft of some hundreds of thousands of opposition votes following the parliamentary election on May 6. For reasons too technically complex to elucidate here—the seedy details are available to the curious (provided they are not faint of heart)—the ruling coalition of thieves and traitors seems poised to form the next government of this long-suffering land, regardless of Sunday’s presidential race upset. That upset was only made possible by the fact that in a two-candidate race it is much, much harder to engineer the wholesale robbery (nearing 7 percent of all votes cast) that we have witnessed in the multi-party ballot on May 6.

The yawning gap between Serbia’s popular will and Belgrade’s declared political outcome was brazenly glossed over in the Western media two weeks ago, however. The Leninist dictum that the morality of an act depends on the progressive status of its perpetrator still applies. In that spirit, Mr. Nikolic’s “ultranationalist” credentials of yore are routinely invoked as his defining trait of today. The comparison is somewhat strained, but just imagine our mainstream media insisting that a dubiously reconstructed “Anti-White, Foreign-Born Radical Leftist” was elected President in November 2008.

In media shorthand the accurate description of President-elect Nikolic would be “a pro-EU moderate nationalist.” In reality it is hard to be both, of course, but many decent Europeans are trying to square the circle, from Scotland and Catalonia to Poland and Slovakia. The only issue on which the winner draws the line is “Kosovo or Serbia?” Unlike his defeated opponent, he realizes that it is impossible to compromise on a first-order priority—the country’s territorial integrity—for the sake of what is a second-order objective of joining an organization. (Whether doing so is on offer, and whether it would confer any benefits on the joiner, is another issue—see my Endless Road interview on RT.) How many eminently clubbable “Europeans” would agree to cede their country’s current sovereignty over Alsace-Lorraine, or South Tyrol, or Sudetenland, or Transylvania, or Schleswig-Holstein, or South Dobrudja, or Silesia (to name but a few of historically contentious provinces) for the sake of remaining in “Europe”?

Unsurprisingly, Nikolic’s reluctance to do so is deemed extremist and criminal. No Serb unashamed of his name and ancestors will ever be deemed clubbable by those hell-bent on turning Europe into Eurabia and morbidly celebrating the demographic demise of European Americans as a great and glorious historical milestone.

Nikolic is a simple man. He is not a statesman but a politician. He made a shrewd move by splitting away from Vojislav Šešelj and his cult known as the Serbian Radical Party, an increasingly irrelevant cabal of aficionados devoted to the hero-worshipping of their unjustly imprisoned Leader. Does he have the guts and the vision to become a true national leader? It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future. Suffice to say, he has the guts and stamina to withstand a race that was spectacularly dirty—thanks to Boris Tadic and his Democratic Party—even by the Third World standards.

The Nikolic victory will not alter the catastrophic position of Serbia in the short term, her headlong economic, social, and above all moral downfall engendered by the plutocratic rule of Tadic and his “pro-Western” camarilla. That victory nevertheless matters a great deal because it has fundamentally altered the balance of political power in Serbia. For years Tadic and his kitchen cabinet have run the entire gamut of state institutions. For years he has doubled, incredibly, in the self-excluding roles of the president of his Democratic Party (Demokratska stranka, DS) while performing the functions of the head of state, thus effectively controlling the DS-dominated government in brazen violation of his constitutional prerogatives as president. Such twining of functions used to be the hallmark of Tito, Stalin and Enver Hoxha. It is unknown to the world deemed democratic today.

In the end Tadic suffered the fate of Slobodan Miloševic. He became cocky, arrogant, and convinced of his own infallability. Just like Miloševic, he cut his presidential mandate short, convinced he could manipulate the electorate by controlled media and pliant institutions. Just like Miloševic in the fall of 2000, he lost—only one-fifth of all eligible voters supported him—because Serbia is still a real country composed of real people… the efforts of Ms. Mary Worlick and her paymasters notwithstanding.