Yugoslav Ruling Coalition Headed for a Landslide in Serbian Election

The alliance that drove Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from power won control of parliament in this country’s dominant republic Saturday, but ultranationalists did better than expected amid popular anger over clashes with ethnic Albanian rebels along the border with Kosovo.

The first official results are not due until today, but exit polls showed the 18-party alliance led by new President Vojislav Kostunica headed for a landslide victory in Serbia with more than 60% of the vote.

If the results are confirmed, Serbia’s new government, to be led by Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, will probably get two-thirds of the parliament’s 250 seats, enough to rewrite the constitution and end the last vestiges of Milosevic rule.

“Today’s election result is a final blow to the Milosevic regime,” Milan Protic, a leader of the alliance, said in an interview. “Today our victory becomes complete.”

Milosevic and key figures in his deposed regime “will be put on trial” for their misdeeds in office, Protic added.

Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia appeared set to win just over 13% of the vote, according to the Strategic Marketing and Media Research Institute, considered one of Yugoslavia’s most reliable polling firms.

Serbian ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj’s Radical Party and the Party of Serbian Unity, founded by assassinated paramilitary commander and gangster Zeljko “Arkan” Raznatovic, were both close to winning at least 5%, the minimum required for seats in the republic’s assembly.

The border conflict between ethnic Albanian rebels and Serbian police in a buffer zone between Serbia and the separatist province of Kosovo was one of the few issues that stirred any emotion during an otherwise dull campaign.

“This helped the nationalist parties to stand out,” sociologist Darko Brocic said.

Still, the Serbian Renewal Movement led by Vuk Draskovic, who once headed the opposition against Milosevic, appeared set to be shut out, along with the neo-Communist Yugoslav Left, which is headed by Milosevic’s wife, Mirjana Markovic.

About 6.5 million people were eligible to vote Saturday, but the estimated turnout of about 60% marked a drop from the federal elections Sept. 24 that led to Milosevic’s ouster. More than 70% of eligible voters cast ballots then.

After Milosevic voted with his wife Saturday, he said happy new year to a throng of reporters and photographers, got into his car and headed back behind the high walls of his guarded mansion in Belgrade, the capital of both Yugoslavia and Serbia. Polls suggest that a large majority of voters want him arrested and put on trial for corruption and election fraud.

Ballot rigging was routine during Milosevic’s 13-year rule, so organizers of Saturday’s election introduced measures such as transparent ballot boxes to reassure voters, whose fingers were sprayed with invisible ink to prevent people from voting more than once.

Yugoslavs wanted boring elections and got boring elections, Marko Blagojevic, head of the independent monitoring group Center for Free Elections and Democracy, told reporters in Belgrade on Saturday.

“In previous elections, we were talking about hundreds of irregularities, and now we are talking about tens,” he told a news conference.

One of the few notable problems was power blackouts, which continue in parts of Serbia despite emergency foreign aid.

“In a large number of polling stations, the voting is proceeding in darkness,” Blagojevic said. “Even candles were not provided.”

Many young people who wanted to cast ballots discovered that they were not on the lists of eligible voters, Blagojevic added, especially in the Socialist Party stronghold of Vranje, in southern Serbia, and in Kosovo, which is under U.N. control.

Djindjic’s new government faces enormous economic, social and political problems, including demands for independence by the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo.

The U.N. administration in Kosovo is expected to hold general elections in the first half of 2001, and an elected Kosovo assembly is likely to press the demand for independence.

More than 100,000 Kosovo Serbs and other minority refugees are living in Serbia proper, many of them in abject poverty, and they aren’t the only ones demanding help in a ruined economy where most workers need jobs on the side to survive on average salaries of $35 a month.

Serbia’s people complain constantly about their falling standard of living, once one of the best in Central and Eastern Europe. In focus groups, the most common statement is “I can’t live anymore on this salary,” said Srdjan Bogosavljevic, one of Yugoslavia’s leading pollsters.

People are afraid of the economic restructuring likely to follow the Milosevic era, which delayed post-Communist reforms so long that they will be even more difficult to face, especially in an economy devastated by Milosevic’s misrule, foreign sanctions and rampant corruption.

A severe psychological shock seems in store for hundreds of thousands of workers, if the tears Bogosavljevic saw in the eyes of one of his 1,000 part-time interviewers were any indication.

The woman was crying because she had been laid off at a state-owned factory in the southern city of Nis, where she earned $5 a month, Bogosavljevic said.

“She earns more than 10 times from us than she did at her regular job, but she was completely upset because she was fired,” he added. “Djindjic knows very well there is no way of recovering these industries. And there is no way of selling these industries [to private investors]. Nobody would buy them.”

Official statistics don’t take into account unreported incomes that an estimated 700,000 workers, such as street vendors and smugglers, already earn in the “gray economy,” Bogosavljevic said. So Djindjic can buy time by leaving things alone, the pollster maintained.

“For the government, there is much more risk in how intellectuals and journalists will react than how ordinary people will,” he added.

“People are really sensible. They know they haven’t produced anything for a while, so they know that they have to wait some time before recovering. They just don’t want to hear empty promises.”

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Times special correspondent Zoran Cirjakovic contributed to this report.