Serbia: shock defeat for pro-EU Tadic
May 20, 2012 11:08 pm
by Stefan Wagstyl
A cry of pain from the Balkans. Serbia’s pro-EU president Boris Tadic suffered a shock defeat in Sunday’s election at the hands of his nationalist challenger Tomislav Nikolic.
The result won’t necessarily throw Serbia off the EU course membership track. But it could complicate the process not least because Nikolic, a former ally of the late strongman Slobodan Milosevic, has been more forthright than Tadic in asserting Serbia’s claim to the lost territory of Kosovo.
Tadic conceded defeat after exit polls showed him trailing Nikolic by a decisive margin. According to pollster CESID Nikolic was ahead with 49.8 per cent against Tadic on 47 percent in a run-off in which fewer than half of Serbia’s eligible voters participated.
The result is not seen as a comment on Tadic’s efforts to pursue EU accession which gained new momentum this year when Serbia became an official candidate for membership.
Rather, Serbs voted him out of office because of the country’s grinding economic difficulties, which have been compounded by the EU’s economic turmoil. With unemployment at 24 per cent, voters, especially the young, are angry at the lack of jobs and opportunities. According to Reuters, Tadic himself said on Sunday: “For the last eight years I was responsible for every human life, for every lost job, and it wasn’t easy.”
The outgoing president, who defeated Nikolic in 2004 and again in 2008, appealed to political leaders to keep the country on track for EU membership.
Belgrade news service B92 reported that in his first comments after claiming victory, Nikolic pledged Serbia would not “stray from its European path.” And he made clear that his victory was the result of Serbia’s domestic economic and political difficulties, including allegations of cronyism among Tadic’s supporters.
“Serbia must develop its economy. The things I pointed out during the campaign must be improved. We have to free ourselves of poverty. We must free ourselves of the low birth rates, bribery, corruption and have friends all over the world,” said Nikolic, adding that Serbia “must get rid of partisan oligarchy”.
Nikolic was last in power in 1999 in alliance with Milosevic, when Nato bombed Serbia in support of its aim of protecting Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority from Serbian violence. Nato drove Serbian forces out of Kosovo, allowing the ethnic Albanians to dominate the territory and in 2008 to declare independence.
Nikolic left the long-established ultranationalist Serb Radical Party four years ago and formed his own Serbian Progressive Party, rebranding himself as a conservative. How EU politicians, conservative and otherwise, take to the former Milosevic ally remains to be seen.
Financial Times