Kostunica leads after first round of Serbian election

The first unofficial results of the Serbian presidential elections show that Serbs failed to elect their new president yesterday and that the battle will be continued in the second round, on 13 October.

The candidates in the second round will be Vojislav Kostunica, currently the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), and the federal Vice Prime Minister, Miroljub Labus.

The complicated mathematics of polls in Serbia calls for at least 50 per cent of turn-out and at least 50 per cent of votes for one candidate to be elected as a President.

Serbia is the bigger sister of Montenegro in FRY and its presidential post became more attractive as the country is due to dissolve into a loose joint state under a European Union-sponsored agreement. According to the statistics of the Centre for Free and Democratic Elections (CESID), Mr Kostunica was heading the race with 31.3 per cent, while Mr Labus ranked second with 27.7 per cent of votes.

The margin of error of CESID, which had more than 15,000 observers at more than 8,000 polling stations, stands at a mere 0.1 or 0.2 per cent. The statistics are almost the same in the headquarters of the most important candidates.

The state electoral commission is due to give official results later in the week.

To overwhelming surprise, the ultra-nationalist Vojislav Seselj ranked third in the presidential race with a score of 22.5 per cent of votes. However, analysts in Belgrade quoted different reasons for such a result for a far-right politician. One of them is the relatively low turn-out of voters, 55.7 per cent out of the 6.5 million electorate. Another is the message by the former strongman Slobodan Milosevic to his sympathisers in Serbia to vote for Mr Seselj. Mr Milosevic's once almighty Socialist Party of Serbia has dissolved into several factions and had two weak candidates in the presidential race.

Mr Milosevic delivered his message from the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, where he is accused of war crimes in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia. Well-informed sources say that the idea for support to Mr Seselj came from Mira Markovic, the influential wife of Mr Milosevic, who recently visited him in Holland.

Although the elections were held in Mr Milosevic's absence, he proved once again that he was capable of manipulating the political scene in Serbia, analysts say. His voters simply followed the message and, at one moment during the hectic post-electoral night, it looked as if the main battle in the second round of presidential elections would be between Mr Kostunica and Mr Seselj.

Analysts blame the relatively low turn-out on pouring rain and unusually cold weather yesterday, but the more objective ones point out that Serbs have once again been attracted by the ideas of nationalism and their former leader Mr Milosevic.