YUGOSLAVIA: Milosevic’s Coalition Leads Election Count So Far

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric-Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Nov 4 1996 (IPS) - With more than half the votes in Sunday’s elections counted, the party of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and its allies appear to be drawing comfortably ahead.

Millions voted for candidates for seats in the federal assembly of Serbia and Montenegro, still federated under the name Yugoslavia, and the two’s numerous municipal assemblies, but millions more boycotted or abstained.

Late night data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) put Milosevic’s Socialist Party (SPS) and its allies, the United Left (JUL) led by his wife Mira Markovic and the tiny New Democracy party (ND) well ahead of the opposition. Announcing initial figures early Monday morning, the FEC said that with 55 percent of votes counted, the SPS-JUL-ND alliance was leading with 45 percent of votes.

From some 2,822,000 votes counted, SPS-JUL-ND has taken more than 1,332,000. The Zajedno (‘Together’), coalition of the four main opposition parties has some 687,000 votes. The third place has gone to the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) of Vojislav Seselj with 537,000 votes.

According to the FEC, out of some 7.5 million voters, about 61 percent or around 4.5 million cast ballots. The country’s two million strong ethnic Albanian community abstained, in line with their ongoing boycott of Serb authority over the disputed Serb province of Kosovo.

For the first time Serb refugees from Croatia and Bosnia- Hercegovina, some 600,000 adults, were denied the vote by changes in the law last July that ruled most of them out of Serbian citizenship.

The step worked heavily in Milosevic’s favour; the refugees were allowed to vote in 1992 and 1993, when they backed Milosevic’s call for armed defence of the Serb ‘national interest’. But having fomented the war around their homes, in 1985 he sold them out for a peace deal with the West, leaving them deeply embittered.

The final results of federal elections are due on Thursday, Nov. 7.

The vote looks likely to bring the JUL into parliament for the first time. “Milosevic needed this backup (of JUL) to gain control of everything” says a Belgrade analyst who preferred to remain anonymous.

“We are going to have a pre-revolution Romanian system, with Ceausescu and Elena Serbian-style” he added, in reference to the former Romanian dictator and his powerful wife.

“The time has come for us to enter the parliament and change the political climate,” said JUL favoured activist Slobodan Cerovic, candidate for mayor of Belgrade.

The ruling Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) in Serbia’s junior partner state, Montenegro, claimed victory in their elections at two AM Monday morning, announcing a “strong lead” in 11 out of 14 voting districts and its 440,000 strong electorate.

Serbia sends 108 and Montenegro 30 deputies to the joint 138- member lower chamber of the federal parliament (the Chamber of Citizens), viewed by many as a rubber-stamp for the decisions taken by Milosevic and his associates.

Milosevic’s position was not at stake; his mandate as president of Serbia expires in December 1997. Yet the vote is personally significant to him. He needs a two-thirds majority in the federal parliament, which he could obtain with the support of the Montenegrin DPS, in order to change the federal constitution so he can run for another term next year.

The SPS-JUL-ND grouping was founded just as public opinion surveys showed a sharp drop in support for the SPS. Their joint campaign, stressing the ‘peace’ achieved at Dayton and the promise of economic recovery after the ending of years of draconian U.N. sanctions, drew on every available resource of the official media.

Chief aides in this objective were Belgrade TV and the daily Politika, edited by Dragan Antic, a close friend of Markovic. The opposition coalition was kept off both TV and daily paper.

Promises of economic recovery featured prominently. According to the Red Cross 28.9 percent of the population live in poverty in a country that used enjoy the highest standard of living in eastern Europe before 1991. The average salary came to about 141 dollars a month in September 1996. There are a measured 819,467 unemployed against 2,065,899 in work.

This distress triggered a wave of protests involving thousands of employees demanding work and payment of unpaid wages in key industrial centres such as Nis, Kragujevac and the Belgrade suburbs.

Economists see no progress without foreign investment and the genuine reform needed to put a basic needs 2.5 billion dollars a year into the economy. The country is still facing the so-called ‘outer wall’ of sanctions that keeps it out of international financial institutions.

In 1996 Yugoslavia’s gross domestic product is estimated to grow by no more than six percent at best, to reach 15.5 billion dollars — 47 percent of the pre-1991 level and well below the official 12.5 percent target.

The economic crisis could have a deeper effect in the municipal elections held Sunday in tandem with the federal assembly votes. An second round of votes in the municipal race is expected in two weeks time.

The contest is sharper at local level, where international issues play no part and the SPS-JUL-ND coalition does not apply. Some 189 municipalities voting Sunday and in later rounds could thus become a battleground between the SPS and JUL.

There were 76 foreign observers at the polls and none of them so far has cited any irregularities in the election process, though the Zajedno coalition of four major opposition parties complained of discrepancies, especially in smaller towns and villages.

“People were intimidated, even threatened if they did not agree to vote for SPS-JUL-ND” said Zajedno coalition spokesman Ivan Kovacevic early Monday. “The representatives of Zajedno were forbidden from taking part in vote counting in some places, although they were members of local commissions.”

For most analysts the results of the elections came as no surprise in a country where there is no tradition of voting against those in power.

“People are ready to vote for those who they already know,” Dejan Djordjevic, a Belgrade journalist says. “They know what to expect from them”.

Vuk Draskovic, the charismatic leader of the largest opposition party, the Serbian Renewal Movement, tells an illustrative story about what happened when he asked one Serbian rural voter whom he planned to vote for. “For Milosevic’s party” the peasant said. “Why don’t you vote for mine?” Draskovic asked.

“I’ll vote for your party when you come to power” the peasant answered. And walked away.