Runoff Expected in Bleak Serb Vote

For the third time in as many months, the people of Serbia tried to choose a president Sunday in an election that offered bleak choices and boded ill--whatever the outcome--for the volatile region’s future.

The leading candidates are the proxy of Balkan strongman Slobodan Milosevic and a violent ultranationalist whose victory would deepen Serbia’s status as an international pariah.

Political parties conducting their own counts of Sunday’s vote agreed early today that Milosevic’s man, Milan Milutinovic, was well in the lead but that a runoff between him and the second-place candidate, Vojislav Seselj, is likely because no candidate is expected to win the required majority.

Their country suffocated by economic depression, many Serbs indicated that they are simply fed up with the sterility of their political system--controlled for more than a decade by Milosevic’s leftist rule--by choosing not to vote at all.

A turnout of less than 50% of the 7.2-million-strong electorate would invalidate the poll. Late Sunday, however, an independent monitoring agency said it believed that about 55% of the electorate voted.

Serbia’s choices are stark: If his candidate wins, Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, is assured several more years of unchallenged power. If Seselj wins, Serbia may once again become a bellicose state bent on undermining peace in the region.

“Serbia has never been in such a hopeless situation,” said Vesna Pesic, one of the opposition leaders who rallied Belgrade residents to stage three months of anti-Milosevic street demonstrations last winter.

“Not a single country deserves candidates like this,” she said. “There was a period [last year] when it appeared some alternatives existed. But now the alternatives are very narrow, and the question arises whether we can ever again offer something that has political meaning for the future of Serbia.”

Such a dismal choice demonstrates how effectively Milosevic has emasculated opposition democratic forces and prevented significant electoral reform despite international pressure.

Pesic and most opposition parties boycotted Sunday’s vote, saying that the lack of access to television and the dearth of independent monitors made for an unfair election.

Whoever is eventually chosen as president--whether in this race or a runoff already slated for Dec. 21--the prospects for rescuing increasingly impoverished Serbia are dim.

Roughly half the adult population is out of work, and those who can flee the country by emigrating are doing so. Most factories remain idle, the national currency has been slipping steadily, and state-sector salaries are long overdue. Smuggling, of everything from cigarettes and alcohol to underwear, sustains thousands of Serbs.

Milosevic served as president of Serbia for most of the decade but was barred constitutionally from a third term. Instead, last summer he made himself president of Yugoslavia, made up of Serbia and the smaller Montenegro, and transferred numerous powers to the once-ceremonial post.

His ally Milutinovic ran, by all accounts, a boring campaign. Milutinovic, a faithful Communist-style apparatchik, is widely seen as little more than a yes man for Milosevic.

Seselj, who commanded paramilitary squads during the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia and advocates doing whatever it takes to build an ethnically pure Greater Serbia, says he will not comply with U.S.-brokered accords that ended the fighting in Bosnia two years ago. His election would usher in a period of potentially violent instability, analysts predict.

Trailing in third place in Sunday’s vote was Vuk Draskovic, the erratic but charismatic leader of the only major opposition party that agreed to participate in the election.

Draskovic seemed to spend most of the campaign fighting with Seselj over who was the better Serb rather than confronting real issues.

Times special correspondent Zoran Cirjakovic in Belgrade contributed to this report.