Note the exact words.. the guy is saying being a communist and or a socialist is a good thing. He's a leftist.
I think you are misinterpreting his statement. He is just describing Milosevic’s political journey. Milosevic started out as a communist then after the fall of the Soviet Union he defined himself as a socialist. However, while he fought to protect Kosovo he never was a strong nationalist who was willing to use the full might of Serbia’s army to win the Yugoslav wars.
"the exact words.. the guy is saying being a communist and or a socialist is a good thing. He's a leftist."
Actually, in a vacuum, you'd be right. But context is everything.
What I think that he was referring to was that Milosevic was "a communist and socialist", but he was not the racist "Hitler" that he was made out to be. Milosevic was into getting and keeping power over all the ethnicities, not killing them all off or turning them into slaves so that they would revolt because there were too many of them.
Serbia has a Right and a Left, but it slightly different than our context for it. Those on the Left are labeled by our Western press as "pro-Western", "pro-European", even "pro-American" -- in short, the Liberal Left is who we are supposed to root for, as exemplified by Boris Tadic & his group. Tadic was IRI trained and he is as close to being our perfect stooge as he can, and still be elected by the Serbs.
Those in the middle, who just want to a normal life, balancing East & West based on where they sit geographically and politically, and who want some basic pride in their country, are called "Nationalists". Vojislav Kostunica is an example of this. He's a guy who under communist Yugoslavia put his life and career on the line to translate the Federalist Papers into the Serbian language, but the Western press still sees him as "not pro-EU enough", "not pro-Western" enough. Kostunica is an idealist, who won't be a Western puppet or play nice with those who do. He wants the "America" for his country that doesn't even exist here in the US anymore.
And then there is Nikolic. He is further Right than an American Republican, but he's not a communist or a fascist. He's more like a further Right George Bush of Serbia, chosen for the same reasons we picked Bush the second time, post 9/11-- because we saw him as "tough on terrorists". But as it was pointed out, Nikolic is a pragmatist, but he doesn't pussyfoot around.
All I can say is thank God I am here and not there, because the choices the Serbian voters have to make are far tougher than ours, in that they are constantly walking a tightrope between East & West and between their past and future, with no one letting them settle their own affairs.