BELGRADE, 26 May 2004 — The Serbian presidential election on June 13 will finally produce a new head of state after three failed votes in the past year and a half, but already the campaign is tainted with charges of foul play.
Since Milan Milutinovic’s term expired on Dec. 29, 2002, the post has been occupied by caretaker presidents, after apathetic Serbian voters failed on three occasions to turn out in adequate numbers to validate attempts at electing a president.
A legal provision requiring that more than half of the electorate turn out for a valid election was scrapped this year, guaranteeing the success of June’s poll regardless of voter numbers.
The latest opinion poll puts Tomislav Nikolic, head of the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) and a prominent member of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, ahead of Boris Tadic, who succeeded assassinated Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic as head of the Democratic Party (DS).
Nikolic held 30.8 percent of the vote and Tadic 20 percent. Dragan Marsicanin, of Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica’s nationalist Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), follows Tadic closely, with 18.6 percent.
The remaining eight candidates were given only marginal chances. A high percentage of those polled, 31.2 percent, said they would not vote, while another 15 percent were still undecided.
While pollsters predicted that Nikolic is certain to reach the runoff, it was not clear whether he would face Tadic or Marsicanin. A week earlier, pollsters tentatively estimated that Tadic, backed by voters still running on anti-Milosevic sentiments, could beat Nikolic in the second round.
However, a brutal smear campaign targeting Tadic, the dead Djindjic and his associates was launched by Marsicanin’s camp this week and could change that perspective.
“One of the two so-called democratic options has spearheaded a practice which we, in my opinion, have not even seen before the elections in 2000,” sociologist Stjepan Gredelj said in an interview this week. “It is an abuse of the dead, of their environment.”
He was referring to a statement issued by Marsicanin’s office saying Djindjic “brought Mafia into government”, and accusing Tadic of involvement in the late prime minister’s murder.
The statement, read out by DSS media spokesman Dejan Mihajlov and backed by Marsicanin as a “manly response”, followed months of mud slinging by DSS in the Djindjic murder trial.
It stunned even hardened Serbs, who believed they had witnessed everything from vote rigging to outright murder, under the Milosevic regime.
“Pre-electoral exhumation,” said the liberal weekly Vreme on its front page, under a photo of Djindjic’s coffin. The conservative weekly NIN, which is close to Kostunica, said: “Manly, and Low?”
On election day, smearing will help neither Marsicanin nor Tadic in a runoff, Gredelj said: “After that horrible statement, I personally asked why I should go to these elections, who would I vote for.”
The office of the Serbian president carries little real power, but the election is seen as another gauge of the deteriorating political climate in the Balkan country as authority returns to the same people who led it through wars and isolation over the last decade.
Although in opposition, Nikolic’s SRS became the strongest single party in the Serbian Parliament according to an early poll last December and he confidently said that he expected victory in the first round of the June 13 election.
Whoever does win faces the threat of renewed isolation over Serbia’s refusal to cooperate with the United Nations war crimes tribunal.
