"Mr. Nikolic embodies the worst forms of Serbian nationalism, whose ideological roots go back to the 'Chetniks'," the daily said, recalling that Nikolic had openly supported "brutal wars of aggression" against Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo.
In Croatia, he served in Serbian volunteer units where, dressed in Chetnik uniforms and espousing ultranationalist ideology, they engaged in systematic murder and destruction, such as in Vukovar and Ovcara, the paper said.
"That Mr. Nikolic boasts of having participated in such a ghastly campaign should be an embarrassment to the Serbian people. He was part of military units that committed unspeakable war crimes," wrote Kuhner.
Portraying him as a "crusading populist and hard-line Serbian nationalist," the columnist recalled that Nikolic had "supported Belgrade's genocidal project," been the deputy leader of the Serbian Radical Party "run by the odious Vojislav Seselj" and that he had called "for the expulsion of non-Serbs from Kosovo and large swaths of Bosnia and Croatia."
"In 1999, Mr. Nikolic served as the deputy prime minister to Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. As NATO bombed Serbia, Mr. Nikolic and his fellow Radicals sought to implement their final solution: the annihilation of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo," wrote Kuhner.
Describing Nikolic's relationship to the West, the daily wrote that he blamed the United States "for Serbia's woes," that he was an "Orthodox Slavophile who seeks close ties with Moscow. An admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mr. Nikolic hopes to emulate the Kremlin's rule. He wants to expand Moscow's influence in the Balkans. In the past, he has suggested that Serbia become a province of Russia."
Kuhner concluded by saying that Nikolic was not a Serbian patriot but a radical nationalist whose election threatened the region's security because he had not abandoned the dream of a Greater Serbia, but claimed that he wanted to achieve it "peacefully."
"Yet his policies will lead to only one outcome: war. He is challenging the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia's neighbors. Mr. Nikolic is a political thug with delusions of grandeur. Serbia is eerily reminiscent of Weimar Germany. Defeated, humiliated and sliding toward an economic abyss, Serbian voters have opted for a neo-Nazi. He is not their savior. Rather, he is leading the Serbs - again - to doom and disaster," the columnist said.