Pro-European coalition wins Serbian elections
13 May 2008
Most Serbians are strongly against Kosovo independence, seeing the province as the cradle of the Serbian state. However, many are also in favour of European integration. There was therefore no clear winner in the run-up to the elections. A day ahead of the ballot, polls indicated that the nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS), led by Tomislav Nikolic, would win the elections with 32 percent of the votes, against 31 percent of the votes for the DS. However, exit polls showed that the pro-European coalition, led by the DS in combination with G17+ and several smaller parties, won a big victory with 38.7 percent of the votes; almost 10 percent more votes than the SRS (29.1 percent). Kostunica’s DSS came in third, with 11.3 percent of the votes. Immediately after the exit polls were announced on Sunday night, Boris Tadic claimed victory, saying “Serbia has chosen the path towards the EU.” Within the EU, which signed a Stabilization and Association Agreement with Serbia on 29 April and where 17 member states decided on 6 May to waive visa fees for Serbian citizens, both in a bid to support the Serbian pro-European forces in the elections, the DS’s win was qualified as a “pro-Europan choice” of the Serbians. It is, though, not yet clear how the winning coalition will form a government, as it did not receive an absolute majority of the votes. In order to create a majority in parliament, they will probably work together with the Liberal Democratic Party (5.2 percent) and several minority parties (Hungarians, Albanians, Bosnian Muslims). However, even then they still need the support of late Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS, 7.9 percent) to form a majority. Nikolic already announced that the SRS will also enter negotiations with the DSS and SPS to form a coalition, in which case the DS would be kept outside the government. In a reaction to this statement, Tadic said that “I am sure that those who wish to bring back Serbia to the 90s [when Milosevic was in power], will try to neglect the will of the people. But I will not accept this.” Election turnout was high, with 60.7 percent compared to a usual turnout of around 50 percent.
