Part of my series
DOTR, in which fragile democracies around the world are examined in an effort to see if they can be saved.
The British newspaper
The Guardian and the Qatari news organization
Al-Jazeera did the best report about this, but I'll add my two cents.
First, the mainstream media text and then the analysis.
A reformist keen on improving relations with the EU and the US was poised last night to become president of Serbia after defeating an ultra-nationalist supporter of Slobodan Milosevic.
Boris Tadic, the former defence minister, took 53.5% of the vote, to 45% for Tomislav Nikolic of the extremist Radical party, election officials said. The turnout was about 48%.
Mr Nikolic was quick to concede defeat last night congratulating his rival but blaming western scaremongering for his defeat.
Mr Tadic's victory arrests a trend over the past year during which Serbia slipped into hostile and bad-tempered isolation, refusing to cooperate on war crimes and voting for nationalists.
Celebrating his victory, Mr Tadic said the election showed there was "no turning back from October 2000", when Mr Milosevic was driven from office.
Following three failed attempts to elect a head of state over the past 18 months because of voter apathy, yesterday's election was seen as the most critical since Mr Milosevic was ousted because of the contrast between the contenders.
There's a very strong bias in the above article concerning the facts. I will now attempt to draw a different conclusion from the same information.
First, the Prime Minister, not the President, is the head of state. Al-Jazeera leads their article saying "Boris Tadic is to be Serbia's first democratically elected president in 60 years" as if that was something amazing. Yugoslavia (now just Serbia and Montenegro) has been having democratic elections for a while now, just not for "President". In previous times, the democratically elected Prime Minister picked the President. It's quite common in democracies around the globe.
Secondly, the cited article states that there had been "three failed attempts" to elect a President in the past 18 months, due to low voter turnout. That's true. But the only reason that the fourth time "succeeded" is because they changed the law.
If you're interested in the original sources for this, click here for the law and here for the changes that were made. The amendment made concerning voter turnout was quite pitiful and says a lot about the state of democracy in this country.
The way it used to work: Half of all registered voters had to vote. If no candidate got more than 50%, the election was rerun with the top two vote receivers. At least half the registered voters had to vote in the runoff election. If that doesn't happen, the elections are null and void. This is what happened three times.
The way it works now: First round, almost exactly the same. Half of all registered voters have to vote. If no one candidate gets a majority, they hold a runoff election. Whichever candidate gets the most votes wins, no matter how few people vote.
That's a huge difference and you can see why it's so important. It's a good thing too, because the official results show that less than half the voters cast a vote. Of those that did, 53% chose the "pro-Western" Tadic and 45% chose the "pro-Serbian" Nikolic. So what the facts actually show is that 26.12% of the registered voters chose Mr. Tadic for the largely ceremonial position as President of Serbia.
Sounds a lot different when you say it that way, doesn't it? To give you a comparison, Mr. Tadic only received 13% of all possible votes in the first round of elections.
By the way, Mr. Nikolic is right, there was enormous pressure from the (western) Europeans to elect Mr. Tadic. Here are some excerpts:
The head of the European Commission Delegation to Serbia and Montenegro, Geoffrey Barrett, welcomed the result on Sunday.
"It is a very good result for Serbia and for democracy in Serbia. It has helped clarify the political scene ... we at the EU are very, very happy with this result."
Before the elections, EU leaders had told voters that a win for Tadic would help Serbia's European integration.
Many EU leaders also said electing Nikolic would turn Serbia into a "pariah state". Nice, eh? Democratically elect someone and that makes the entire country a pariah?
Well now you know. And knowing is half the battle :)
Mir
-Soj