POLITICS
Party. Jovanović gained 218,555 votes, or 5.4%, in the first round. Tadić can also count on support from the Hungarian national minority and their leader, Istvan Pastor, who had 92,899 votes, or 2.3%. Jovanović, however, is not going to give ‘blanc’ support to Tadić. He has stated that he will request talks with Tadić and demand that the Serbian President promise to demand early parliamentary elections if the Government continues to jeopardise Serbia’s European perspective. “I want to talk to Tadić in order to enable the active participation of LDP in the second phase of the campaign, and the subject of discussion will be the unconditional implementation of further European integrations, dropping the policy of conditioning the European future of Serbia with Kosovo and the continuation of co-operation with The Hague Tribunal”. Jovanović said that he will not call for a boycott, but will also not call on his voters to support Tadić if these talks do not take place, because “LDP is aware that the consequences of Nikolić’s victory would be dramatic”. Tadić can also count on part of the electoral body who voted for the Socialist Mrkonjić, considering that this candidate emphasised the European direction for Serbia as prima-
ry in his campaign. However, this party has stated that SPS is yet to decide whether it will support anybody. If we add up the votes of Tadić, Ilić and Jovanović, we come to the number of over two million voters which served as the basis for Tadić’s optimistic announcement for the second round campaign that the number of his voters will come close to that figure, which he counts are made up of pro-European and pro-democratic forces – the same voters who ensured victory back in 2000. Tadić’s aim on 3rd February is to gather more than two million people around the idea of “Serbia in the European Union”. Tadić said that all parties and citizens will be deciding between two clear directions – European and non-European. “Everybody will be able to decide these days between two concepts – for Europe and against Europe. There is no third way,” said Tadić, adding that his aim is to unite the interests of all democratic forces, but before anything else the interests of the citizens of Serbia. “You will see. We will certainly win in the second round, because in the first round we had a big dispersion of votes. We have never won as many votes as now. We managed to gather around one and a half million people around one European idea, and
this time we will gather more than two million, that is our goal”, said Tadić. When we analyse the total results of the first round of the presidential elections, we can notice several things. Firstly, the ‘populist’ coalition achieved worse results than in the last presidential elections, but their capacity and room for manoeuvre for influencing the governing coalition and the wider electoral body is exceptionally high, while the Socialists and Jovanović’s Liberals also improved their results from the last elections. It is interesting to note that Jovanović’s party was third in Serbia’s big cities, straight after the Democrats and the Radicals. That was the case in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Subotica and Niš. On the other side, Tadić had more votes in Novi Sad, even though the Radicals are in power in that town, and, vice versa, in Belgrade Nikolić had more votes in spite of the Democrats running the city administration. According to Minister without portfolio Dragan Ðilas, who is president of the Democratic Party’s Local Committee in Belgrade, the difference in those two cities is minimal. Ðilas emphasised that what was important was that citizens saw these election as the referendum between two policies
Political Stability Dictates Investments “The economic consequences of Tomislav Nikolić being elected president might not be visible in the first few months, but they would directly affect the number of direct foreign investments, which are in decline in Serbia anyway.” BY TATJANA OSTOJIĆ ragomir Jankovic, Executive Director of the European Economic Institute in Brussels, belives that the political consequences of the second round of the presidential elections in Serbia, in the case of Tomislav Nikolić’s victory, would not be too important for the citizens of Serbia, but the economic consequences of such a decision by the citizens would be far-reaching.
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14 CorD / February 2008
Dragomir Janković, Executive Director of the European Economic Institute