Tadic re-election keeps Serbia facing westwards

Close to four and a half million Serbs - some 67% of eligible voters - turned out to vote in the presidential elections on Sunday (3 February). The turnout was high by Serb standards. In what was widely seen as a referendum on Serbia’s relations with the EU, Serbia’s President Boris Tadic was re-elected for a second five-year term in office, beating his opponent, Tomislav Nikolic of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), by just 120,000 votes, or less than a couple of percentage points.

Tadic is the more pro-European of the two candidates - which is not saying much.

Nikolic, a radical nationalist, wants to block closer ties with the EU over the imminent independence of Kosovo. Tadic opposes independence for Kosovo as much as any other leading politician in Serbia but refuses to let Kosovo preclude Serbia signing a pre-accession agreement with the EU.

It appears that Nikolic’s fiery rhetoric prompted many Serbs who would not otherwise have voted to trudge to their local polling station on Sunday. The high turnout may well have been decisive in securing a Tadic win.

"There was a high turnout because people were scared," says Eric Gordy, who follows Serbian politics from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London. "This is an indication that Serbian society is terribly divided."

Gordy also thinks that the EU’s policy has not helped. He describes the Union’s approach to Serbia as "clumsy" and "badly timed", a criticism that is shared by other observers.

In an attempt to sway the vote, EU foreign ministers offered Serbia a deal to make up for the lack of a full pre-accession Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA), less than a week before the run-off.

The SAA cannot be signed because the Netherlands and Belgium object to Serbia’s poor record of co-operation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

EU policymakers will no doubt feel that the election outcome vindicates their offer.

The EU had offered to sign the deal on Thursday (7 February) but Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica and his allies prevented the signing; they want to freeze relations with the EU over the planned dispatch of the Union’s judicial and police mission to Kosovo.

Commission President José Manuel Barroso congratulated Tadic on Monday saying: "Yesterday saw a victory for democracy in Serbia and for the European values we share." But the Radicals are democrats, too, and xenophobia, nationalism and populism are hardly absent from Europe, as Barroso’s statement seems to imply.

Tadic’s victory removes any pressure for the EU to reassess its policy towards Serbia and the wider region. The pull of eventual membership remains the EU’s main tool to encourage reform in Serbia, even in the absence of evidence that it is actually working.

Despite the 7 February deal and talks about visa liberalisation, the SAA will for the time being remain outside Serbia’s reach. And none of the problems that currently burden the relationship between Serbia and the EU is about to disappear simply because the incumbent president has been re-elected.

If this weekend’s vote was a vote for continuity, the question arises whether continuity is desirable.

But Barroso’s wish to "accelerate Serbia’s progress towards the EU" remains dependent on the country’s willingness to meet the Union’s conditions, which include full co-operation with the ICTY. It is difficult to see why a Tadic win would unblock Serbia’s co-operation with the tribunal.

Serbia’s politicians "will continue to do as little as they can and bide their time", Gordy says of the war-crimes issue. The ICTY plans not to open any new trials after 2008 and is scheduled to wrap up all appeals procedures by 2010. Unless the four remaining fugitives (all of them Serbs) are caught before the end of the year, they will evade international justice.

The fraying coalition between Koštunica’s Democratic Party of Serbia and Tadic’s Democratic Party could now become even more difficult to maintain. Belgrade media reported on Wednesday (6 February) that the government was close to falling because of the proposed agreement with the EU, which would trigger a snap election, perhaps to coincide with Serbia’s local elections scheduled for May.

All the drama surrounding the presidential election has not changed the fundamental dynamics of Serbia’s fraught relations with the West, nor has it changed the urgent need for the EU to come up with a credible strategy to encourage reform in Serbia without throwing out its conditions.

Close to four and a half million Serbs - some 67% of eligible voters - turned out to vote in the presidential elections on Sunday (3 February). The turnout was high by Serb standards. In what was widely seen as a referendum on Serbia’s relations with the EU, Serbia’s President Boris Tadic was re-elected for a second five-year term in office, beating his opponent, Tomislav Nikolic of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), by just 120,000 votes, or less than a couple of percentage points.