June 21, 2004
In other news from Serbia...
The Legionnaire has stopped talking.
He says he's sick and exhausted. After prison doctors examined him, his trial was adjourned until July 12. This is rather a long adjournment, and cynical observers are already noting that it will be safely past next week's runoff election for Serbia's Presidency.
On the plus side, Prime Minister Kostunica -- after several days of agonizing over it -- issued a statement supporting Democrat Boris Tadic against Radical Tomislav Nikolic.
Not easy for Kostunica. He's a proud man, and he felt the humiliating defeat of "his" candidate keenly. And he loathes the Democrats; he thinks they're corrupt, and also that they were trying to harass and persecute him personally, especially in the last year or so of their administration. His party helped bring them down in a crushing defeat just six months ago. But now he has to support a Democrat to become Serbia's President -- head of state and so his nominal superior.
Personally, I wasn't sure he'd be able to bring himself to do it. It's really gratifying to see that he came around so quickly.
Rival candidate Bogoljub Karic -- who scored a surprisingly high third place in the presidential run, and who seems to want to be Serbia's Silvio Berlusconi -- also came around to endorsing Tadic. Since Karic got nearly half a million votes, nearly 20%, this is also a great help. So at this point I'm going to live a little dangerously and predict a Tadic win.
Meanwhile: eighty per cent of students at Belgrade University would leave Serbia if they could, according to the results of an opinion poll published by Belgrade daily Politika.