Big Parties Pitch Hard for Minority Votes

Serbia’s big political parties are courting minority votes by forging local coalitions with ethnic minority parties then appointing their leaders to prominent posts, analysts say.

One example of the unusual coalitions this creates at local level is in the village of Margita, home to both Serbs and Romanians.

There, the hard-line nationalist Serbian Radical Party, SRS, whose leader Vojislav Seselj is on trial for war crimes in The Hague, is led by a Romanian, Mihai Jepure.

About 20 ethnic Romanians have signed up at the SRS local branch – almost half the membership.

Jepure says he joined the Radicals because Seselj always told the truth. “Seselj was the only politician who had always criticised communism and the Milosevic government,” he said. “He was the only one looking after ordinary poor citizens.”

The case of Margita highlights the success of the big parties, even the extreme right-wing ones, in bringing ethnic minorities into their fold.

Analysts believe it reflects the fact no Serbian party can expect to form a government on its own, making the search for coalition partners crucial.

On the other hand, the minority party leaders can often only enter parliament as part of a larger political coalition, when they can expect to obtain important posts.

In Vojvodina, various small parties reflect the interests of more than 20 different ethnic communities.

After the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, the minorities, which backed the incoming Democratic Opposition of Serbia, DOS, expected rewards in the form of guaranteed representation in government, irrespective of the votes won.

Disappointment set in when the government retained a high minimum threshold of votes to enter parliament.

The electoral law requires minority candidates to win at least 18,000 votes to take a seat, which is a threshold that only candidates of ethnic Hungarian and Bosniak parties can hope to pass.

For the rest, coalitions with big parties offer the only way into parliament. And quite often these coalitions are forged despite huge differences in the parties' political platforms.

Dusan Janjic, of the Forum for Ethnic Relations, said such coalitions offered benefits for all parties involved.

“The principle the big parties use in the process is simple – it adds up to ‘my interest in negotiating with you is as big as your electorate’,” he said.

“On the other hand minority leaders have their own interests, which is to enter parliament despite the obstacles posed by the electoral law.”

The Democratic Party, DS, headed by pro-European Serbian president, Boris Tadic, has formed a coalition with the strongest Hungarian party, the Alliance of Vojvodina's Hungarians, SVM, headed by Josef Kasza.

This party has recently demanded territorial autonomy within Vojvodina for municipalities with ethnic Hungarian majority.

The DS struck a similar alliance with Sulejman Ugljanin's List for Sandzak. Widely seen as a radical Bosniak party, it also seeks territorial autonomy for majority-Bosniak areas in Sandzak.

“These are artificial coalitions,” commented Janjic. “On the one hand we have the SVM whose main objective is territorial autonomy for Hungarians, while on the other hand we have the Democratic Party, which strongly opposes such a development.”

He added, “The same applies to the Ugljanin's Bosniak party with its demands for Sandzak, which the DS also disapproves of.”

Laszlo Joza, an SVM member, does not deny that the coalition between the DS and SVM looks unusual. But he said it was the only way for minority parties to gain seats in the Serbian parliament.

Jozef Kasza, SVM leader, shares his view. “Minorities have to make all sorts of political deals with Serbian parties to survive,” he said.

The SVM benefited in the Vojvodina election in September 2004 from its coalition with the DS. The SVM obtained senior positions in the parliament and the provincial government, including the posts of deputy speaker of parliament, deputy prime minister, minister for national minorities and culture minister.

Ugljanin's List for Sandzak got two seats in the Serbian parliament thanks to its alliance with the DS in the last parliamentary election.

More recently, Ugljanin's party signed an agreement on September 22 with the Democratic Party of Serbia, DSS, led by Serbia’s prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, thereby joining the ruling coalition.

The DS continues actively to woo voters from minority groups and last December set up a Committee of Ethnic Communities to increase its approval rating.

The chair of the committee, Lodi Gabor, also deputy prime minister of Vojvodina, says the aim is to monitor the application of minority rights in culture, education, religion, the use of mother tongue and publishing.

The most unusual coalition at local level is most certainly the alliance between the Democratic Alliance of Vojvodina's Hungarians, DZVM, led by Pal Sandor, and the Serbian Radical Party.

This post-election coalition, which came into existence last October, is running municipal affairs in the town of Becej. Sandor was then elected president of the local assembly, where he remained until this April.

Like the SVM, the rival DZVM champions autonomy for municipalities with a Hungarian majority. Indeed, its programme is the antithesis of the Radical platform, which seeks to minimise, or scrap, Vojvodina’s autonomy.

But Sandor said an increase in ethnic incidents between Serbs and Hungarians in the area justified forming a DZVM-Radical coalition.

“We wanted to involve the Radicals in the problems that minority groups face and so force them to assume some responsibility,” said Sandor.

“It was a good move,” he added, as the Radicals for the first time began to condemn the violent incidents.

Many members of ethnic minorities who are not affiliated to any party are sceptical about such coalitions, however. They suspect that while the horse-trading goes on behind closed doors, minority rights are ignored.

Laszlo Vegel, a prominent Vojvodina intellectual, says these coalitions always appear suspicious, as the details of their agreements are never revealed to the public.

Pavel Domonji, of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, agrees. “It is very hard to find out what sort of internal deals on important posts and positions are made,” he said.

“Everyone tries to conceal the price they paid for concessions in the process of political horse-trading. No one will ever tell you whether it is a matter of dollars, euro, apartments, plots of land or promises to drop criminal or libel charges.”

Goran Basic, director of the Centre for Researching Ethnicity, is also sceptical about the politicians who claim to represent their minorities in parliament.

“I am not sure Hungarian and Bosniak representatives who gain seats in parliament with DS assistance will really try to protect the interests of all the 20 minority groups in Serbia,” he said.

“I would not even say they would protect the interests of their own ethnic group, as experience suggests they are more likely to set their sights on ministerial portfolios or other public offices.”

Parallel to the formation of coalitions is the silent but booming trade among ordinary people, taking out membership of big parties in exchange for rewards in the form of jobs and promotions.

One well-educated Romanian woman from Alibunar, in eastern Vojvodina, says she recently joined Kostunica's DSS because it was the only way to get a better job.

“Until I signed up, everybody around me treated me like a mad Romanian who bore a grudge against Serbia because I demanded my rights,” she said.

“After joining the DSS, I openly demanded a better-paid job in my profession in a bigger city and got it. All of a sudden, I became a respectable expert in my field.”

Another Romanian woman, a company secretary in Pancevo, said she joined the DS to save her husband’s job after his boss had insulted him for marrying a Romanian.

“We didn’t know if he was joking or not but we dared not ask, so we decided both to join DS and so show we love Serbia,” said the woman.

DSS officials say they take no account of members’ ethnic background when selecting deputies, though they admit they have yet to select anyone from a minority background to sit in the Serbian parliament.

Velibor Radusinovic, a senior DSS official, says the only condition for the selection of deputies is expertise. “It turns out that we have no deputies in parliament from minority ethnic groups but it was not done on purpose, that is for sure,” he said.

DS officials also claim they are unconcerned about whether members are from ethnic minorities or not.

Curiously, the Radicals have more deputies in the Serbian parliament from minority groups than either the DS or the DSS. They include Sulejman Spaho, a Muslim, and Stefan Zankov, a Bulgarian.

Back in the ethnically mixed Romanian-Serbian village of Margita, the local Radical boss, Mihai Jepure, says he numbers ethnic Hungarians and Macedonians among his local party colleagues.

All of them, he said, reject the claim that the Radicals took a leading part in the persecution of the non-Serb population in Vojvodina in the Nineties.

But a local Serb, who preferred to remain anonymous, said the Romanians only joined Radicals because they were afraid of them, “The Romanians have told me it was better for them with the Radicals than against them.”

Marinika Ciobanu is an editor at the Romanian-language newspaper Libertatea.