Power of the Majority

Opposition deputies realized that the ruling socialists in Serbia and Montenegro had pre-arranged for the electoral district law to be adopted by the Federal Parliament. The deputies of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) and the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS), of course knew it too, but both had the urge to play the debate scene, and all of it together made a surreal atmosphere at the session of the Chamber of Citizens, held on 18 June. According to Dragoljub Micunovic of the Democratic Party (DC), the debate flowed "as smoothly as the Danube with no wind" while the Parliament was adopting the law which has divided Yugoslavia into 36 electoral districts (29 in Serbia, seven in Montenegro) which ensures an enormous advantage to the ruling groups in the federal parliamentary elections scheduled for the end of this year.

The changes of the Law on the election of MPs were, as expected, adopted by simple majority - but by a very tight one. Of the 138 MPs, 71 voted in favour. Although adoption of election regulations by simple majority is constitutionally very disputable - opposition deputies said they would institute court proceedings - the ruling parties opted for this procedure because there was no way they would have ensured a two-third majority.

The political essence of dividing the country into so many electoral districts (up till now Serbia had nine and Montenegro one) is to eliminate minor parties and to transform the proportional election system into a majority election system. This means that only major parties, primarily the ruling parties in both republics will have a chance in the forthcoming elections. Opposition parties will either go in the elections together (forming election blocks which will be able to compete with the mighty socialists) or will drop out.

Opposition MPs drew attention to the consequences of this law:

"Tyrannies can be made by means of law, but apart from the fact that such governments are 'most disgusting' in the political system of every country, marginalization of the opposition will hit us back in the national sense" (Desimir Tosic, DC)

"Election law is the basis of a political system and this will cause great tensions. Peaceful transition cannot be carried out by a confrontation of the government and the opposition, nor by explosive, risky, brutal election campaigns. This has been neglected in order to maintain absolute power, because of a conviction that only two parties can be in power, because they refused even to think about coalition governments. They are imposing the polarization of the political specter. In some electoral units, the census is shifted from five to 20 per cent" (Srdjan Darmanovic, Social-Democratic Party of Montenegro)

"In Romania and Hungary our brother Serbs have the right to be represented in the parliaments just because they are a minority. How will the ethnic Hungarians in Kanjiza, Senta and Ada, some thirty thousand of them, be represented in the Zrenjanin electoral district which has a total of 300 thousand voters?" (Blasko Kopilovic, Reform Democratic Party of Vojvodina)

"Let us not, Mr. Dacic, compare ourselves with Great Britain and the United States. They are old democracies which reached a consensus on general social values, so they can have only two big parties which are not ideologically confronted but are more of technical teams. A society which is getting out of a civil war, there must be more parties, there must be a period of coalition governments" (Dragoljub Micunovic, DC)

Not only did representatives of the government fail to offer strong facts in reply to all these comments (which would probably have been rather difficult), but their speeches did not make much sense at all.

Ivica Dacic, the head of the SPS deputy group, cynically claimed that the "proposal offers not only to the democratization of the election law, but of the entire election process," that it eliminated the (negative) "democracy of parties" and introduced the (positive) "democracy of people," because "the people should chose who is going to represent them," and that the opposition would do better if they devoted more attention to the quality of their programmes and people. Later, with his recognizable arrogance, he told journalists that "SPS will win despite the election law" because "the socialists win in both the majority and combined systems" and that "there is no new variant of the election system which we could invent for the opposition to win."