Serbia


Formation of a yet another opposition coalition in Serbia is covered by Vesna Vujic of the AIM news pool in a report from Belgrade on June 19, 1998.

The same day that Boris Yeltsin attempted to but Milosevic under control, a number of opposition parties in Serbia, mainly non-parliamentarian, made public that they want to do the same. They did not do that so explicitly though.

This new grouping of opposition parties comes about at a time of almost complete indifference of the people, who, after the breakdown of the "Zajedno" coalition, lost the last hope in possible changes. The fact is that the opposition parties cannot gather themselves internally, and that they are almost constantly under internal tensions. Ahead of its forthcoming congress, such a situation is most evident in the Democratic party.

Almost all leaders gathered around this initiative for democratic changes have been followed by failures, so it is very hard to believe them in future seriousness. Milan Panic, who has his "Alliance for Change" behind him and which has been recently formed in Nis, is not hiding the fact that gaining the confidence of the population will be a serious task. Aware of this is also the president of the Civil Alliance of Serbia, Vesna Pesic, who thinks that the lost confidence of the citizens can be regained by a demonstration of serious behavior.

According to Dr. Ognjen Pribicevic, an expert from the Institute of Social Science in Belgrade, this grouping has to solve a lot of problems. The key one, he thinks, is the inability of this grouping to influence the voting public of the ruling SPS-SRS, since it is more strongly based towards right-of -centre, instead towards the left. Besides this, he stresses, they do not have a policy that could gain new voters. As the second big problem he points out that none of the representatives of these parties comes through as a leader, and such is essential. It is his opinion that Zoran Djindjic definitely cannot be the leader, since he also lost his credibility when "Zajedno" disintegrated. Of Milan Panic he thinks that he is a very able businessman, but without political talents.

Although the Belgrade political grapevine is already putting up names that eventually could add to a better image of the future coalition, there is no discussion within the grouping about it yet. Sympathies are raised by mentioning of names of historian Milan St. Protic, and Miroljub Labus, a renowned economic expert.

According to Pribicevic"s opinion, it is quite debatable what is the position within this grouping of parties of Nebojsa Covic, former SPS official, and former general Vuko Obradovic from the Socialdemocratic party. This analyst is convinced that the Serbian opposition scene needs new faces, who would have to appear from probably new parties, but that could also emerge from the existing ones.



Source: "AIM" news pool, June 18, 1998