Macedonian’s Victory Has a Bitter Taste : Balkans: President Kiro Gligorov has been reelected handily. But ethnic conflict remains a threat in the former Yugoslav republic.

For a man freshly rewarded for peacefully piloting this former Yugoslav republic to independence, President Kiro Gligorov exuded little semblance of victory Monday after his Alliance for Macedonia won an unassailable lock on power.

With Greece strangling the country with an economic blockade, U.N. sanctions against Serbia having cost Macedonia $3 billion and the region’s ethnic conflicts poised to spread here, Gligorov emerged from the elections with a sobering vision of the perils that lie ahead.

“I don’t feel a sense of triumph,” the president conceded in an interview, even as his moderate coalition was racking up a commanding majority in the 120-seat national assembly.

International election monitors described the two-stage voting for president and Parliament that concluded Sunday as reasonably free and fair, considering the instability of the Balkans and the fledgling nature of democratic reform here.

But the vote was marred by low turnout and an opposition boycott, ostensibly to protest widespread fraud, leaving the new leadership with the one-party look of the old Communist monopoly replaced during Macedonia’s first pluralist vote four years ago.

A final tally is not expected until later this week, but Gligorov’s Alliance is projected to win at least 90 seats, a good deal more than the two-thirds needed to ensure passage of constitutional issues. Most of the rest of the seats are likely to go to two ethnic Albanian parties aligned with Gligorov, who has battled the kind of aggressive nationalism that brought war to Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

But with the economy nose-diving and the defeated nationalist opposition threatening social unrest, the 2.2 million people of Macedonia appear headed for a winter of discontent that could crush the last fragile barriers to an expanded Balkan conflict.

Western diplomats and officials with the 1,100-strong U.N. peacekeeping force here assessed the election results as a demonstration of resistance to ethnic unrest despite the boycott by the nationalist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization.

The example of Bosnia, where a nationalist Serb rebellion against independence has killed 200,000 and made 2 million homeless, has served as a deterrent to ethnic conflict in Macedonia, where Albanians constitute more than 30% of the population.

But Gligorov and foreign observers dejectedly concede that whether Macedonia escapes the violent horrors visited on other former Yugoslav republics depends more on the actions of leaders in the countries that surround it than on the laudable political moderation exhibited within.

“I’m not pleased at all by the fundamental principles of democracy that have been violated in Bosnia,” Gligorov said, characterizing a five-nation proposal to partition Bosnia on ethnic lines as a recipe for regional disaster.

The international community has also been slow to ease Macedonia’s economic woes, which diplomats and the special U.N. envoy for Macedonia, Hugo Anson, warn could play into the hands of the disgruntled opposition.

Anson praised the United Nations for “putting its money where its mouth is” by deploying U.S. and Scandinavian peacekeepers to Macedonia in the first international effort at preventing a conflict.

But he and other observers expressed concern about the slow response of Western countries to Macedonia’s critical need for economic support to weather the devastating blockade imposed by Greece in its attempt to force this country to change its name and its flag. Athens insists that Macedonia harbors territorial ambitions against its northern province of the same name, and it has been vetoing European Union aid proposals.

A Western diplomat painted an even more ominous outlook, describing this country as a sitting duck for nationalist adventures.

In Serbia’s tense Kosovo province, which makes up most of Macedonia’s northern border, 2 million Albanians have been living in a virtual police state imposed by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

“If Milosevic, who has been known to need an occasional crisis, decides to put the hand on Kosovo, the situation could deteriorate quickly,” a U.N. official said.

Any conflict in Kosovo, the medieval Serbian heartland that Milosevic has vowed to “recover” from the majority Albanians, would drive hundreds of thousands to seek refuge with Albanians here. That, in turn, would sharpen tensions with the majority Slavs and expose Macedonia to Serbian accusations that it was harboring enemies.