Milosevic Family’s Political Fortunes Falter in Serbia

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s family was doubly humiliated in Serbia’s weekend election, with support for the neo-Communist party of his wife, Mirjana Markovic, crashing even more than for his own Socialists.

Based on returns from more than half the polling stations, Markovic’s Yugoslav Left, or JUL, won the support of just 0.37% of voters, far below the 5% it had needed to stay in the Serbian parliament, the electoral commission said Sunday. Serbia is the dominant of Yugoslavia’s two republics.

JUL had by then received only 8,245 votes from Saturday’s general election, a dramatic reversal in political fortune for the party of Markovic, a powerful figure in Yugoslavia until her husband was ousted as president in October.

With more than 56% of the ballots counted Sunday, the 18-party alliance led by new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica had secured 178 seats in the 250-member parliament--more than the two-thirds majority needed to change the constitution, the electoral commission said.

Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia was a distant second, with 36 seats--its worst result ever.

Two other parties made it into the legislature: the ultranationalist Radical Party, with 22 seats, and the hard-line Serbian Unity Party, with 14. Final results were expected today.

“Today’s elections will go down in Serbia’s history with black letters,” JUL spokeswoman Dragana Kuzmanovic told a news conference Saturday night as the party’s defeat became clear.

“These elections were marked by the rule that no rule was obeyed,” she was quoted as saying, apparently referring among other things to the party’s complaints of bias against it in state media.

Senior party official Goran Matic, who was Yugoslav information minister in the Milosevic era, complained of a lynch-mob atmosphere in Serbia’s politics and media.

“We hope that there will be no more such undemocratic elections,” he told B-92 radio Sunday.

The downfall of the former first couple--who grew up together in the eastern Serbian town of Pozarevac and were high school sweethearts--could hardly have been more clear-cut.

In the outgoing Serbian legislature, Markovic’s JUL and Milosevic’s Socialists together held 110 of the 250 seats, forming a coalition government together with the Radical Party.

The election completed the takeover of power by allies of Kostunica following their victory in September federal elections and October’s popular uprising, which finally forced Milosevic to concede defeat.

Markovic, an unpopular figure with many Serbs, was elected deputy in the federal Yugoslav parliament on Sept. 24.