oriented towards neo-fascism and striving for the territorial expansion of Serbia. The Chetniks were a World War II movement in Yugoslavia led by Draža Mihailović, who was accused of collaboration with the occupying forces and war crimes. In 1993, during the Bosnian War, Nikolić was proclaimed as Chetnik voivode by Šešelj in a ceremony on the Romanija Mountain. Nikolić has been a deputy in the National Assembly of Serbia since 1991, the only one elected continuously since that year. Under Slobodan Milošević and the Socialist Party of Serbia, he and Šešelj were sentenced to three months in prison which he served in Gnjilane. However, in March 1998, the Serbian Radical Party formed a coalition with the Socialist Party and he then became the vice-president of the Government of Serbia and, by the end of 1999, the vice-president of the government of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In 2000, he began the first of several runs for the presidency of Serbia. In the FR Yugoslavia presidential election of 2000, he finished in third place behind Vojislav Koštunica and Slobodan Milošević. He then ran in the 2003 Serbian presidential election, in which garnered the most votes in the first round (46.23%), ahead of Dragoljub Mićunović, but the results were invalidated due to a low turnout of only 38.8%. Nikolić made yet another bid for the presidency in the 2004 presidential election. In the first round, he received 30.1% of the vote and Boris Tadić received 27.3%. In the second round held on 27 June, Nikolić lost to Tadić by 53.7% to 45.4%. On 23 February 2003, he became the deputy leader of the party after Vojislav Šešelj went voluntarily to the ICTY. During his leadership of the party, Nikolić favoured pushing the party towards focusing on more economic and social issues such as poverty and unemployment, rather than militant nationalism. In a remark about Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić's injured leg, Nikolić said on 28 February 2003: "If anyone of you, in the following month or two, sees Zoran Đinđić somewhere, tell him that Tito also had a problem with a leg before his death". Less than two weeks later Đinđić was assassinated in Belgrade. Nikolić later apologized for his statement by saying that he would have never said that had he known what would happen. In contrast to Đinđić, Nikolić repeatedly refused to apologize for stating "I don't regret that Slavko