Serbian Presidential Elections: A Crossroad

[Tsontos]

Voters in Serbia go to the polls on 20 January to elect a new president.

The poll comes at a sensitive time, with the new prime minister of the UN-administered Serbian province of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, saying he wants to steer Kosovo to formal independence within "a few weeks".

There are nine contenders for the presidency but most analysts agree that a second round is almost a certainty and the real race will be between the current pro-Western incumbent and a hard-line nationalist challenger.

Q: Who are the main candidates?

Boris Tadic, the current president and leader of the Democratic Party has pledged to continue the country's pro-Western orientation and free market reforms. His support comes from the G17 Plus group and three Muslim minority parties. He has campaigned under the slogan "Both Kosovo and the EU", arguing Kosovo should remain in Serbia, and Serbia should join the EU.

Tomislav Nikolic, the deputy leader of the hard-line nationalist Serbian Radical Party. Mr Nikolic is standing in for the party's official leader, Vojislav Seselj, who is still on trial in The Hague. This is his fourth attempt to win the presidency. In 2004, he made it to the second round, only to lose to Boris Tadic. Mr Nikolic has recently toned down his rhetoric but is on the record for saying that if the new government "peacefully accepts" Kosovo's independence his party would not "sit calmly and wait". He has previously called for military intervention in Kosovo if it splits from Serbia.

Velimir Ilic, the leader of the New Serbia party. He advocates traditional family values and enjoys considerable support among the rural population. He is backed by Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica's Democratic Party of Serbia. He is known to use sharp rhetoric against the West on the Kosovo issue.

Cedomir Jovanovic, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, is the only candidate who has spoken openly in favour of Kosovo's independence. Mr Jovanovic was a prominent student leader who took part in anti-Milosevic demonstrations in the late 1990s and a MP for the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, a coalition that helped bring down the Milosevic regime after the 2000 parliamentary elections.

Q: What are the main issues?

Kosovo's future and EU accession talks are set to play an important role in the poll. Bread and butter issues such as unemployment and improving living standards are also expected to figure prominently.

Q: Why is Kosovo such an important issue?

The new president is set to complete negotiations on the future status of the province. None of the candidates is keen to go down in history as the one who gave up the province considered by many Serbs as the cradle of their culture, religion and national identity. Both Mr Tadic and Mr Nikolic have voiced their strong opposition to any unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo's majority ethnic Albanian population.

Q: Where do the main candidates stand on the EU?

Mr Tadic advocates closer ties with the EU, while Mr Nikolic is in favour of closer ties with Russia and China. EU leaders meeting in Brussels in December offered to accelerate Serbia's membership in the bloc, but only after Belgrade hands over war crime fugitives still at large. In the past, Mr Tadic has pledged to find and arrest war crime suspects such as Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, while Mr Nikolic has let it be known that the fugitives would no longer have to live in fear of arrest if he came to power.

Q: How does the system work?

The president is elected for a five-year term and cannot serve more than two terms. If no candidate achieves the 50% threshold in the first round, the two candidates with the most votes go into a run-off within two weeks.

Nearly 6.7m voters are registered in Serbia, along with 107,000 Serbs living in Kosovo. They will be able to cast their ballots at more than 8,000 polling stations. Just over 37,000 Serbs living abroad are also eligible.

Q: What are the presidential powers?

The role of president is largely ceremonial but it does carry enormous symbolic influence and the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

Q: When are the results expected?

Preliminary results, which have a history of being accurate, are usually available by late evening on polling day. By midnight it should be clear whether there will be a second round of voting and who will be taking part.

Q: Who will be monitoring the election?

Serbia's election commission has invited observers from the Organisation of Security and Co-operation in Europe and from Russia. On 11 January the commission said it would bar US and British observers over their support for Kosovo's drive for independence. The Supreme Court has since overruled the decision but the commission says it will not abide by the ruling.

Q: What do opinion polls say?

Most polls since early December have shown Boris Tadic in the lead, with Tomislav Nikolic in the second place.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7196896.stm

[Tsontos]

Whats your opinion Vasiliye?

[nsminc]

I read that a nationalist is in the lead.

[Vasiliye]

As expected, Serbia's presidential election next month's election will be a showdown between Boris Tadic, a pro-Western candidate, and a nationalist Tomislav Nikolic, who favors closer ties to Russia.

After the election on Sunday, Jan 20, the nationalists seemed to have the edge going into next month's presidential election. Nationalist candidate Tomislav Nikolic took 39.6 percent of the vote ahead of the 35.5 percent by pro-Western President Boris Tadic in the nine-candidate runoff.



The Feb. 3 presidential run-off is seen as a referendum on the Balkan country's future. The importance of the elections for the future direction of the country accounts for Sunday's 61 percent turnout, the highest since 2000.



Serbia at a crossroads

Nikolic, of the Radical Party, has balked at EU membership and instead wants Serbia to act as a middle player between the EU and Russia. Nikolic has denied he's an isolationist.


"Serbia voted today for both Europe and Russia," he told state broadcaster RTS. "The road to Russia is at this moment more open, and I'll open the road to the European Union."

Tadic is generally seen as the pro-Europe candidate. He said the elections will be important "to show that Serbia is absolutely not giving up its European course, the path it started on in 2000."



The European Union said on Monday that it was confident Serbia would deepen ties with the bloc.



"We are confident that Serbia will continue to pursue its European course and we are convinced that progress towards the EU can be accelerated," the office of EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said in a statement.



Many Serbs want EU membership, but resent the EU's support for the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo. Both candidates are united in their opposition of Kosovo independence.



In Kosovo, the majority ethnic Albania population has boycotted Serbian elections since the early 1990s. There are about 100,000 Serbs in Kosovo, which has a population of approximately 1.9 million.



"The elections in Serbia have no impact on Kosovo," said Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci. "We have our path."



Candidates need to broaden support



Woman votes in Serbian electionBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Election seen as pivotal to Serbia's future

The candidates will need third party votes to win the presidential election. Key could be Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, political analyst Milan Nikolic told Reuters news agency. Kostunica, a nationalist, had supported third-place candidate Velimir Ilic, a nationalist from the New Serbia party.



Kostunica is Tadic's partner in the coalition government, but wants the country to take a hard line against the EU over Kosovo and also favors closer ties to Russia.



"Kostunica is again in a position to decide the fate of the country," Nikolic said.

[Makedonia25]

Nationalism Rising in Serbia?

Monday, Jan. 21, 2008 By DEJAN ANASTASIJEVIC/BELGRADE


How much of its pride can a country allow to be punctured? Already punished by the effects of the 1999 Balkan war and international opprobrium, Serbia is in the middle of an election process that will reveal how much more national identity its citizens are willing to shed as they head into the future. Will they opt for an ultra-nationalist President willing to put up a struggle over Kosovo, the so-called historic heartland of the Serb nation that is now dominated by ethnic Albanians about to declare the province's independence? Or will they opt for a President who will not kick up too much of a fuss in order to smooth the country's long but lucrative journey into a European Union adamant that Kosovo be separated from Serbia?

While the presidency of Serbia is a largely ceremonial role, electing the President has become a barometer of popular — and thus political — sentiment. In the first round of voting on Jan. 20, ultra-nationalist candidate Tomislav Nikolic won the most votes, 1.6 million or 39.4% of the ballots cast. The incumbent President, pro-Western Boris Tadic, came in second with 35.4% or 1.4 million votes. The contest is now headed for a Feb. 3 runoff.

Although both Nikolic and Tadic strongly oppose Kosovo's independence, Tadic believes that Serbia should nevertheless strive toward EU membership. Nikolic, on the other hand, wants to freeze diplomatic relations with any country that recognizes Kosovo; he seeks to establish close ties with Russia as an alternative to Europe. During the campaign, he said that if he became President, he would invite Russia to build military bases along Serbia's border with Kosovo.

During the 1999 war, NATO compelled Serbian security forces to pull out of Kosovo, which was then placed under United Nations rule. Kosovo's provisional government, dominated by the province's mostly ethnic Albanian population, is expected to proclaim independence within the next few weeks. Most European Union members and the United States have announced that they will back Kosovo as an independent state, despite fierce opposition by Serbia and Russia.

Concern over disrupting E.U. talks may have beefed up last-minute support for Tadic in Sunday's vote (he had trailed substantially in most pre-election polls). However, Nikolic may have the upper hand in the runoff, particularly because he is expected to receive the support of the Socialist Party, whose candidate got 6% of the vote. Nikolic is a deputy of the Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, who is currently under trial for crimes against humanity for his wartime activity. Both Seselj and Nikolic were close associates of late President Slobodan Milosevic, who died during his own war crimes trial in the Hague in 2006.

"Tadic can only win if he gets sincere support from the Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica," Goran Svilanovic, a former Serbian Foreign Minister tells TIME. "The key to Serbia's future lies in [Kostunica's] hands." Kostunica, who shares power with Tadic's Democratic Party in the government, could help turn out support for the incumbent from moderate nationalists. However, Kostunica has an uneasy relationship with Tadic; and the Prime Minister's recent rhetoric has become increasingly anti-Western, referring to Western support for Kosovo independence as "ripping out the heart of Serbia." So far, he has refused to comment on the first round's results, or to indicate whom he intends to support.

Even if Nikolic wins the runoff, he will not be able to change Serbian politics dramatically or immediately. Kostunica and his moderate nationalism are likely to hold sway even if he and Tadic decide to call it quits. Kostunica's parliamentary bloc, while numerically small, is an essential ally to any larger party seeking to form a ruling coalition. Meanwhile, parliamentary elections are not scheduled until January 2011. "The government would probably survive, at least for a while, even with Nikolic as President", Svilanovic explains. "But Serbia's road towards the E.U. membership would certainly become much more complicated at best."