Serbia and Croatia: Election blight

Date: 22/11/03

A nationalist revival in the Balkans

THEY call him the “gravedigger”. Tomislav Nikolic was once a cemetery director. Now he has buried the Serbian government. He is, by default, leader of the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party (the real leader, Vojislav Seselj, is in prison awaiting trial at the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague). On November 16th Mr Nikolic scored a stunning victory in the country's presidential election, over a dull grandee put up by the governing coalition.

Besides the bloody war record of the Serbian Radicals' militia, the party has had close contacts over the years with the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and even Saddam Hussein. Time to panic? No, but Serbia faces renewed instability.

Mr Nikolic will not in fact be Serbia's new president, since 61% of the electorate did not vote, meaning that the 50% threshold required for the election to succeed was missed (for a third time). On this occasion, one reason for the failure was that the ruling coalition had just given up the ghost. Realising that it would lose a vote of confidence in parliament, it called a general election for December 28th. Many reform-minded democrats then did not bother to vote in the presidential race.

Srdjan Bogosavljevic, head of Strategic Marketing, a polling firm, says the likely outcome in December lies somewhere between “a catastrophe and a disaster”. He foresees a big risk of the Radicals being the largest single party, but unable to form a government. That is the catastrophe. A deputy prime minister, Zarko Korac, says that even the party of Vojislav Kostunica, the moderate nationalist and a formerYugoslav president, would not dare to form a coalition with the Radicals, for it would make him “dead meat for the West.”

Two other main parties are in the running. The scandal-tainted Democratic Party, the core of the present government, will be devastated at the elections. G17 Plus, which has the image of a pro-reform, pro-European party, may yet emerge as a kingmaker. But the disaster envisaged by Mr Bogosavljevic would be if these two, plus Mr Kostunica's party, formed an unnatural coalition, for that would allow the Radicals to prosper as sole opposition.

Inside the Serbian government building, a gloomy end-of-term feeling pervades. Behind closed doors ministers use the worst possible epithets to describe their colleagues, before popping round to plot election strategies with them.

The losers from all this, inevitably, are the people of Serbia. Reform and foreign investment have both stalled. Post-election horse-trading could take weeks, if not months. And the hard jobs, such as sending Ratko Mladic, an indicted Bosnian Serb general, to The Hague, would still be left undone. Many think it was the indictments of four Serbian generals issued by the tribunal's chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, that finished off the government.

In Croatia, meanwhile, the Croatian Democratic Union, whose ex-leader, Franjo Tudjman, conspired with Slobodan Milosevic to dismember Bosnia, could return to power in the elections on November 23rd. The party insists that it has changed, and says that it would even send Ante Gotovina, another indicted general, to The Hague. But many doubt its new-found respectability.