Demographic anxiety supplied the political opening that elevated Milosevic to power

Evidence

All this aroused Serbian nationalism and Slobodan Milosevic saw his opportunity. In 1987 he delivered a major speech at Kosovo appealing to Serbs to claim their own land and history. “Immediately a great number of Serbs—communist, noncommunist and even anticommunist—started to gather around him, determined not only to protect the Serbian minority in Kosovo, but to suppress the Albanians and turn them into second-class citizens. Milosevic was soon acknowledged as a national leader.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 725