Survey suggests Serb voters polarised ahead of May elections

25/04/2008

Serbia appears to be heading towards inconclusive parliamentary election results in May, according to a survey released on Thursday, which also showed the country's radicals ahead of its pro-Western democrats.

(Blic - 25/04/08; AP, AFP, DPA, AKI, Balkan Insight, B92 - 24/04/08)

Observers see the May elections as a choice between forging closer ties with the EU, as advocated by President Boris Tadic, or embracing Russia. [Getty Images]

An ultranationalist party is ahead of pro-Western democrats in the run-up to Serbia's early parliamentary elections on May 11th, but is unlikely to win an outright majority, a poll released on Thursday (April 24th) suggests.

According to the poll of 2,732 respondents conducted by the Centre for Free Election and Democracy (CeSID) between April 14th and April 20th, the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) would have won hypothetically last week, besting the pro-European bloc led by President Boris Tadic's Democratic Party (DS).

While the CeSID pollsters provided neither percentages nor a margin of error, international news agencies saw those results as translating into 36.5% voter support for the SRS and 33.5% for the DS.

The Popular Coalition, led by outgoing Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica's Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), would have been a distant third with 12.5% of the vote.

Two other parties -- Cedomir Jovanovic's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and former President Slobodan Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) -- are likely to pass the 5% threshold necessary for seats in parliament.

Pollsters believe between 4.3 million and 4.7 million of all 6,723,762 registered voters will cast ballots on May 11th. They also noted that the percentage of eligible Serbian voters regularly stay home from the polls is comparable to that in other countries and stands at 12% to 13%.

The government called early elections last month following a fatal rift in the ruling coalition -- Kostunica's increasingly nationalist DSS and the pro-Western DS and G17 Plus. They could not agree over Serbia's further integration in the EU after the majority of its member states recognised Kosovo's declaration of independence.

Serbian voters are "extremely polarised," pollster Srecko Mihajlovic told the AP, singling out the country's relations with the EU as the main reason.

Observers thus see the May elections as a choice between forging closer ties with the EU, as advocated by Tadic, or embracing Russia instead, as preferred by the SRS.

But as neither the SRS nor the DS is likely to have an outright majority after next month's vote, whichever party commands a plurality will have to court coalition partners, with Kostunica and the Socialists seen as the possible choice.

This would make the DSS leader again a kingmaker, a frequent role for him recently.

Given the continuing bickering between the DS and the DSS, analysts consider a new Tadic-Kostunica coalition improbable. Their likeliest scenario is for the DSS to team up with the SRS, with the SPS possibly becoming the smallest coalition partner.

Such an alliance could command 138 seats in the new 250-member parliament, according to the DPA.

Failure to form a government would force new elections and perpetuate the political stalemate, damaging the Serbian economy. It would also make it difficult, if not impossible, to take any concrete steps towards EU integration.

The West, concerned that the country could either backtrack into ultranationalism or become mired in stagnation, has sought hold out hope of a European future for Serbia. However, those assurances have also been balanced against the continued insistence that Belgrade must extradite fugitive war crimes indictees, including former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic.

On Thursday, the foreign minister of the Netherlands – which has staunchly insisted on extraditions as a precondition for further progress towards integration – suggested that his country might be willing to show flexibility on the issue.

"We want to make clear that we have nothing against Serbia," Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen told lawmakers, arguing that a victory by the Serbian far right would make it even less likely that Mladic would ever face justice. "I want to look for a creative solution to this dilemma."