A hardline Serbian nationalist mistrusted by the West was expected to take the lead yesterday in a presidential election that could bring down the government of Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica.
But acting chief Tomislav Nikolic of the Radical Party, formally headed by war crimes suspect Vojislav Seselj from behind bars in The Hague, is unlikely to win outright and may face a tight contest in a run-off in two weeks.
Diplomats have warned a Nikolic victory would be bad for impoverished Serbia and would risk scaring away foreign investors, even though he has toned down his ultra-nationalist rhetoric and the office's powers are limited.
PHOTO: AP
Pro-Western reformer Boris Tadic of the Democratic Party, like the Radicals now in opposition, is tipped to follow Nikolic into a second round that would be held on June 27. Kostunica ally Dragan Marsicanin has been trailing them in opinion polls.
A victory for Nikolic would likely spell trouble for Kostunica's three-month-old minority coalition as the liberal G-17 party has threatened to quit if he becomes head of state.
The Radicals oppose handing over suspects to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, a key condition for closer ties with the EU, the wealthy club Serbia hopes to join one day.
Seselj is an old ally of former president Slobodan Milosevic and like him is accused of atrocities in the 1990s Balkan wars.
His party, which also came first in December's parliamentary poll but failed to get into power, has benefited from widespread disappointment with the Western-style economic and political reforms pushed through since Milosevic's overthrow in 2000.
"I voted for Nikolic because I always vote against the authorities," said Vojislav Stojanovic, a 64-year-old mathematics teacher, after he cast his ballot in the capital.
Student Ana Milkovic said the hardline leader would drag the country backward. She said Tadic was the only candidate who could continue the reformist work of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, assassinated by suspected crime gang bosses last year.
"The first thing I expect the president to do is to improve the economy and our standards of living," the 24-year-old said.
Serbia has been without an elected head of state since president Milan Milutinovic, also indicted by the war crimes tribunal, stepped down when his term expired in January last year. Milutinovic subsequently surrendered to the tribunal.
Three previous attempts to pick a successor failed because voter turnout fell short of the required 50 percent, including one in November in which Nikolic came out ahead. But that rule has since been scrapped.
Surveys published this week gave Nikolic 29 percent backing and Tadic around 23 percent. Business tycoon Bogoljub Karic was running third ahead of Marsicanin in some opinion polls.
But they also forecast that Tadic would win against Nikolic in a run-off as he was likely to pick up more votes from supporters of defeated candidates.
Failure by Marsicanin to enter the second round would be a major setback for Kostunica, a conservative who helped oust Milosevic but whose government relies on the parliamentary support of the former strongman's Socialist Party.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS