BELGRADE, Serbia, May 14 (UPI) -- Yugoslav Princess Jelisaveta Karadjordjevic has announced she will run for the Serbian presidency in elections scheduled for June 13.
Her candidacy had been the subject of mounting speculation until she confirmed she would run in several Serbian newspapers Friday.
Princess Jelisaveta, 68, will need 10,000 signatures to validate her candidacy and will face an uphill task in defeating front-runner Tomislav Nikolic of the hard line nationalists Radical Party.
The princess is renowned in Serbia for her work with Serbian refugees from the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The mother of American actress Catherine Oxenberg, she was once engaged to British actor Richard Burton.
The Yugoslav royal family spent decades in exile having fled the country just before the Nazi invasion in World War II. The communists refused to allow them back and they were not granted citizenship until after the fall of President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
Should Princess Jelisaveta succeed in taking the presidency she will not be the first royal in the former communist world to have entered the political arena.
In Bulgaria, former King Simeon Saxe Coburg II became prime minister in 2001.
