The Power of the President

Under the statues of all five relevant parties in Serbia, the president represents the party and is also chairman of the main board or has the authority to "call and chair main and executive board session" (SPS, DS). Besides those provisions which are included in the statutes of most European parties, the SPO and DS also gave their leaders some important personal powers. The SPO leader has the authority to name a third of the executive board, the party general secretary and party representatives at international gatherings.

The party president's powers also gain weight because of the proportional election system in both Serbia and Montenegro and at federal level in which the party leadership decides which candidates to put where on its electoral lists. That allows party leaders to surround themselves with their own people and efficiently suppress criticism even when the party suffers failure after failure at elections as the opposition in the FRY has.

The statutes of some opposition parties, adopted after 1990, tend to expand the powers of the president. But, it would be wrong to look for the reasons in the party leaders' hunger for power. The statutory expansion of powers results from the legitimacy of the policy that important political decisions have to be taken quickly which collective bodies simply can't do. That is the main reason why parties can't be a community of equals.

The need to centralize power in opposition parties stems from the fact that, from 1990 to 1995 in both republics, they faced well organized former communist parties and their political struggle forced them to consolidate their organization. Party leaders in both republics demonstrated their power on several occasions in internal strife by eliminating their immediate opponents. Bearing that in mind, the party leaderships in the FRY could be called monocratic with one person having the power to force a decision by a group.

That leads to destabilization within the parties since arbitrary decisions by the leaders cause bitter resistance by rival leaders in the party. Leadership members who are dissatisfied with the party leader's new course try, but fail, to win support in the party collective bodies and then they form a new party which leads to an even smaller political mosaic.

The fact that the level of circulation of the ruling members of a party is low shows that they are monocratic. In illustration: 33.4% (51 of 153) of the SPS main board kept their positions after the party congress in March compared to 23.1% (6 of 26) of the executive board.

The results of the internal clashes to date also show the power of party leaders since many of those conflicts ended with the exclusion of leading party members from party organs. Mihailo Markovic, the deposed SPS main board member, perfectly described the relationship between the president and the other party leaders in his open letter on November 28, 1995. He listed all the statutory shortcomings in his deposal and pointed the finger at main board members who helped eliminate him. "You silently pushed through something that is completely counter to any democracy. How do you want to work from now on? Will you ever manage to stand up and tell the president that you are the highest party body between congresses which defines policy and takes the most important decisions, and that he has to listen to you not the other way around?"

The only successful rebellion against a party leader happened in February 1994 when Democratic Party leader Dragoljub Micunovic, facing the possibility of being ousted, resigned. The explanation for that should be sought in the organization of that party whose leadership was oligarchic not monocratic.

Vladimir Goati

(From the article Stabilization of Democracy or Return to Monotheism - the Third Yugoslavia in the Early 1990s)

We Have No Parties

There never was anyone in the opposition who was undemocratic, immature and not serious and became a mature, serious democrat when he took power

Desimir Tosic (1920) is a reliable witness for judgment on democracy: he has 60 years of political experience marked with struggle for democracy at home and abroad; just prior to World War II, the president of the student organization of the Democratic Party (which got him arrested and sent to a concentration camp in 1943), in 1990 the vice-president of the Democratic Party, and he is one of the few opposition politicians who won't get angry if asked: Are there any political parties in Serbia after 1990?

TOSIC: "Parties started developing in Serbia in 1990. Gradually they disappeared, i.e. they only became organizations to preserve power and organizations to grab power. Ideologically, our parties didn't show any new ideas, or ideas in general. But even worse, there was no work being done in the parties. Internal democracy disappeared soon and now, in 1996, the parties are deformed compared to the what they were in 1990. The last SPS congress marks the start of a period when we don't have any more parties. What the SPS did at its congress, the DS leaders started doing in 1993: chased people away, imposed a kind of apparatchik which the old regime was full of. But, unlike the Communist party which had a rich ideology and certain individuals who were the ideological and party elite, today's parties have no ideology or party elite. They are just shapeless masses in which only the leader exists.

All the parties, except the two smallest, have become turncoats; the political scene is crazily unbalanced. As for the leaders, they support each other, even the so-called Socialists. Unlike Slobodan Milosevic, many have become immeasurably vulgar.

There's a theoretical and practical question: If the parties today are ideologically empty and with undemocratic inner party methods, who can believe they will be the parties with vision and democracy once they come to power?

Some parties did change from being democratic while in the opposition to undemocratic once they took power. But there never was and never will be anyone in the opposition who was undemocratic, immature and not serious and became a mature, serious democrat when he took power."

Why did the parties disappear and the leaders remain?

"Because the opposition started a mindless fight against the regime from the first day. None of them had any serious or lengthy debates: what happened to us as a nation, as a society; what happened to democratic ideas; what does the spirit and education of self-management mean here; how strong was the regime in 1990; and how can its heirs, the so-called socialists, be overcome and reforms started by consensus.

Not even the colossal defeats have started us thinking aloud. Since society got caught in an unprecedented economic crisis, the financing of parties was up to the leaders. Honest or dubious rich people did not trust the parties because they weren't interested, they gave the leaders cash or the ruling parties drew money from the state. Probably no other party leader in the world managed to improve their standard of living as much as the leaders of our parties did in the midst of the crisis."