April 28, 2004
The President of Serbia
Presidential elections have been scheduled for June 13.
Serbia has a "French" Parliamentary system -- that is, they have both a Prime Minister (the guy who can get the most votes in Parliament, and who runs the government) and a strong President (who is the head of state, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and various other things). The President is elected separately from Parliament.
But: since the last President stepped down from office, in late 2002, Serbia has not had a President. They haven't been able to elect one.
Officially, this is because they had an old Yugoslav-era law on the books that said a Presidential election needed a voter turnout of at least 50%. This was no big deal back in the Communist days, when voter turnouts were always quite high. But these days, people are disillusioned and apathetic and it's hard to get them motivated. One, two, three times, in a little over a year, voters failed to turn out in the necessary numbers for the Presidential elections.
I said "officially". In reality, the tunout law was kept on the books by the late Prime Minister Djindjic and his Democratic Party. They could have amended it any time, making the election of a President simple and easy. But Djindjic didn't want to have a President of Serbia.
And he most particularly didn't want Vojislav Kostunica to be President. Djindjic had found Kostunica an annoying partner when Kostunica was President of Yugoslavia -- pedantic, conservative, holier-than-thou -- and was also wary of his popularity. So, Djindjic made sure that the old rules were left in place, and Kostunica never became President.
But now Djindjic is dead, and Kostunica is Prime Minister. And one of the first acts of Serbia's new Parliament was to amend the election law to remove the turnout requirement. So now, at last, Serbia will have a President.
But who? Well, there are three candidates.
Tomislav Nikolic is the candidate of the Serbian Radical Party, and right now it looks like he's the man to beat. The Serbian Radicals were the ultra-nationalist party; their leader, Seselj, is presently in prison at the Hague, awaiting trial for war crimes. But they've moderated their rhetoric a bit, and they're presently the single most popular party in Serbia, with the largest bloc of seats in Parliament. Nikolic is pretty much guaranteed 35%-40% of the vote.
Dragan Marsicanin is the favored candidate of Prime Minister Kostunica and his Democratic Party of Serbia. He's presently Serbia's Minister of Economy. Right now, he's trailing in the polls.
Boris Tadic is the candidate of Djindjic's old Democratic Party. For a while, it looked like the Democratic Party was going to tear itself to pieces; it was blocked out of the ruling coalition in Parliament, and it was divided by a feud between Tadic and party leader Boris Zivkovic (who was Prime Minister for a few months last year, between Djindjic's assassination in March and the collapse of the government in November.) Tadic was Djindjic's Defense Minister, and he's reasonably popular.
The election will have two rounds. If nobody wins a clear majority in the first round (which nobody ever has), then the two strongest candidates go into a runoff two weeks later. Right now the smart money is on Tadic and Nikolic, but the election is still six weeks away, so a lot can happen.
The victory of any of these three would be... interesting... although for very different reasons. More on this in a bit.
Posted by douglas at April 28, 2004 10:52 AM