Serbian Candidates Tap Into Hunger for National Identity

NOVI SAD, Yugoslavia — As naturally as breathing, Vojislav Kostunica opened his campaign rally here by accepting a traditional Serbian welcome: a piece of bread, a dish of salt and a glass of brandy.

The ritual was a not-so-subtle reminder of one of Kostunica’s main selling points in the Serbian presidential race. He is widely viewed as a “true Serb.”

“Kostunica is trying to preserve the last crumb of dignity for us,” said Jelical Markovic, a 39-year-old single mother who attended the rally in this city bombed by NATO during its 1999 campaign against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. “Those who are in power now, their personal interest is all they care about.”

Two years after the ouster of Milosevic, who used nationalist rhetoric to rally ethnic Serbs to the country’s detriment, a deep yearning remains for the confidence that nationalism offers: a sense of identity in a world that for most Serbs is filled with uncertainty.

For most Serbs, the 1990s were a humiliation in which their country, once viewed as the most progressive of the post-World War II Communist states, was hobbled politically and economically by Milosevic’s rule. Now they believe that the international community is making unreasonable demands and conditioning every dollar of aid on the country’s compliance with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

The result is an election campaign with a strong nationalist backbeat. Of the 11 candidates on the ballot today, only two have eschewed nationalist themes.

Westerners have misunderstood the soul of Serbia, said James Lyon, director of the Yugoslav office of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based organization that monitors troubled countries.

“The overthrow of Milosevic was not a liberal, democratic revolution,” Lyon said. “It was a nationalist revolution that brought some democratic leaders to power, but the majority remains traditional, conservative and very nationalist.”

Although no one believes that this election will take Serbia back to a Milosevic-style government, the transition to a democratic system and a market economy could move forward far more slowly than over the last two years, analysts say.

“Both of the leading candidates worked to unseat Milosevic; both are committed democrats. But they do have different programs,” a Western diplomat said.

The two leading candidates are Kostunica and Miroljub Labus, a former professor of Marxist economy who recruited a cadre of expatriate Serbs to return to help build the country’s economy when Milosevic fell. Labus is generally viewed as the candidate who would most aggressively push the economic reforms that would help the country attract investment and create jobs.

Kostunica now holds the job of Yugoslav president, but he is running for the presidency of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia. Although it might sound a bit like the president of the United States running for governor of California, the Serbian post is actually more powerful.

When Kostunica defeated Milosevic for the Yugoslav presidency two years ago, he was lauded for his dedication to the rule of law and his background as a constitutional lawyer. He promised to support economic and democratic reforms, but in fact he had little responsibility for rebuilding the country’s ruined economy. That was the charge of the Serbian parliament led by Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, and it has proved a painful task.

For roughly 45 years after World War II, Yugoslavia had a state-run economy, although a more flexible one than that of other Communist countries. In 1987, when Milosevic rose to power, he drained its treasury by giving increasingly large subsidies for essential goods such as electricity, vegetable oil, bread, milk and sugar, and by waging a series of costly wars. He also allowed money to be siphoned off by his mafia cronies.

When Kostunica and Djindjic came to power two years ago, the country was deeply in debt, many state-owned industries were in disrepair and the NATO bombing had taken a toll on some of the country’s infrastructure. Since then, the public has faced repeated sharp increases in the cost of essential goods, and wage increases have been insufficient to keep up with them.

“In the past two years, people have to sell their little weekend houses, their cars, their homes even. A transition is OK, but not this overnight transition,” said Markovic, the single mother and Kostunica supporter in Novi Sad, adding that she had traded in her more expensive car for a cheaper one and given up going to cultural events and movies to save money.

At Labus’ campaign appearance in Novi Sad, just one day after Kostunica’s, there was no bread, no salt, no brandy. Instead, a live band played a mix of songs drawn from the many faces of Serbia: Gypsy rhythms, the rock ‘n’ roll of Belgrade youths and the folk music of the region.

Labus has made a point of reaching out to minorities in his campaign and has mostly distanced himself from the nationalist rhetoric. But even he has made some concessions, occasionally referring to his pride in being a Serb and changing his signature from Latin script to Cyrillic, according to local media.

His main political disadvantage is also the source of his political advancement: his close association with Djindjic, who is one of the most powerful, but also least liked, public figures in the country.

Djindjic, whose approval ratings are below 20%, is widely viewed as being close to mafia figures and has been sharply criticized for his recent decision to dismiss members of parliament who were not supporting him.

“Labus is seen as connected with Djindjic. He’s not a powerful person himself, so if he wins, Djindjic can eat him in five minutes,” said Branko Pavlovic, a deputy in the Serbian parliament who once supported Djindjic’s coalition but has since become disillusioned.

“For those of us who fought Milosevic and wanted a modern Serbia, it is pretty much frustrating the way Djindjic has destroyed the parliament,” Pavlovic said.

But it is a testament to Djindjic’s influence that most people talk as if the two leading contenders were Kostunica and Djindjic -- even though the latter’s name will not be on the ballot.

Nonetheless, Labus appears to be holding his own. One recent poll found that Labus, who has waged a Western-style campaign that targets younger voters as well as ethnic minorities, would win support from 29% of voters while Kostunica would garner the votes of 27%.

An ultranationalist candidate, Vojislav Seselj, ranked third, with support from nearly 12% of voters.

Other polls reverse the Kostunica-Labus numbers, but the two are within a percentage point of each other.

Still, it is unlikely -- although not impossible -- that Labus will have enough votes to win outright under Serbian election law, which requires the winner to receive a majority, or more than 50% of the vote.

And in a runoff, Kostunica is likely to pick up the votes of those who voted for more strident nationalists in the first round.

By the standards of the Milosevic era, Kostunica’s brand of nationalism seems like weak tea, but it doesn’t take much for Serbs to sense whether a political figure can make them proud.

For instance, Kostunica has not bowed as easily as Djindjic to the request by the United States for the extradition of war crimes suspects to the Hague tribunal, where Milosevic is on trial on war crimes charges.

And Kostunica insists that the ethnic Albanian-majority province of Kosovo, now under United Nations control, will remain a part of Serbia -- a critical point for many Serbs, because it is the spiritual seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

“When Kostunica says The Hague is biased against Serbs, everybody likes that because they feel The Hague is biased and most of them don’t know any war criminals personally. So they feel Kostunica is sharing their feelings,” said Srdjan Bogosavljevic, who runs Strategic Marketing and Media Research, a polling firm in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital.

But even Kostunica’s “milder” nationalism can be provocative. This month, he created a firestorm when he went to a border town near Bosnia-Herzegovina and announced that the neighboring Bosnian Serb republic was only “temporarily separated” from Serbia.

Bosnians demanded a retraction of his comments, as did the international community.

Less than a decade ago, Bosnian Muslims and ethnic Croats fought a bloody 3 1/2-year war to win independence from Yugoslavia. Bosnia, although divided into a Serb republic and a federation that includes Muslims and ethnic Croats, is now independent.

Kostunica said that his remarks were misunderstood and that he meant all of the former Yugoslav federation would one day be together as part of the European community. But his words undoubtedly also did the job of reassuring those who might have doubted his Serbian fervor.

For those voters eager to avoid alienating the international community and who look forward to the day when Yugoslavia is more like the rest of Europe, it felt like a throwback.

“My hope for the future is that we in Novi Sad, in Serbia, live better,” said Svetlana Buncic, 40, an account manager and mother, who said she would vote for Labus, saying he is “a fresh face.”

“I like that he wants us to join the European Union,” she said, “because I want us to go to work like the Italians, like the French, with a smile on our face.”