During the years of Nikolić's leadership, SRS became a moderate nationalist party, but because of disagreements with Šešelj, Nikolić took many of the high-ranking members of the party to form the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), which would become the ruling party in 2012. After the split, Dragan Todorović assumed "de facto" leadership, and the party went into a major decline, only pulling 4% of the vote in 2012 and 2% in 2014, the first time that SRS was not represented in the parliament. Shortly after Šešelj's return to Serbia in 2014, the party gained back some of its popularity, officially returning to its far-right roots. The SRS placed third with 8% of the vote in the 2016 election. In late 2019, the party went into decline again, and in the 2020 election it ended up only with 2% of the vote and gaining no seats in the parliament again.