Cane and Top Hat

The usually well informed Dusan Mihajlovic, president of the New Democracy party, member of the left coalition, supporter of the idea of a big coalition between SPO and SPS, estimated last week on the BK Television show called Gravitation that consultations on the structure of the new republic's government which started last week in Serbia could last a little longer. Meanwhile, the government has made two moves of good will - Danica Draskovic, powerful wife of SPO president Vuk Draskovic, was given space in the state media (maybe even as a means of dealing with Montenegrin president Djukanovic), which earlier used to satanized her; and Milan Komnenic, representative of SPO, was included in the parliamentary delegation which will be present at the European Council session. The two big coalitions in Great Britain, the one founded between the Conservative and Liberal Party before 1914, and the one founded between the same parties after 1935, support the idea that in hard times, in serious countries, this formula may be successful.

The political scene of Serbia, however, is not a two-party one - currently it is three-party, with Seselj's Radicals taking a fierce jump-off position, and with Djindjic, who has miscalculated, in the waiting room. Mathematical knowledge on coalitions will have to be applied here (was it the mathematician Neuman who became famous for these models?), which shows what happens when a coalition of two parties brings a third one in, in the position of the loser, and then conflict arises between them as to the splitting of the rewards, how they mitigate this conflict on account of the third party and how that one tries to break its isolation. Mihajlovic doesn't exclude the possibility that no compromise is achieved, and that the failure of negotiations ends up finally with new elections. He is trying to scare his left coalition partners a little bit with his foreboding that the godfathers (Draskovic and Seselj) may make a deal and form a temporary government which would dictate new elections under its own conditions, and he indirectly says that Draskovic's starting price is not so high, taking into account what a successful deal could bring.

For now, the Socialists do not show haste in this business, because the splitting of power in Serbia is not at the top of their political priority list. The Serbian Constitution does not require a strict deadline for when the government has to be formed, and they are preoccupied with relations with Montenegro, with the Montenegrin parliamentary elections and the consolidation of power in the Yugoslav federation.

Serbia, which is still under their sovereign rule, has finally been beginning to initiate a parliamentary stage, but without a stabile majority (non-majority parliamentarianism), a phase of permanent grouping, ungrouping and recalculations, of the actual dividing up of power, of bargaining and guessing, a task at which they are skilled, because they "hold the keys to the treasury".

In spite of the uncompromising character of their leader, the Socialist party has so far entered into various coalitions, not caring much about ideological colors - it was in a tacit coalition with the Radicals in 1992, and in the same year, on the federal level, was with the Democrats and the Reformists in the Panic's government, using in machiavelian style the Radicals' services for breaking the same government. They were pretty generous towards JUL and New Democracy, and underground disputes along Socialist-JUList lines were quite successfully hidden. They were rough at braking the coalitions, but in the case of Vojislav Seselj, they didn't entirely draw their sword.

SPO was the pivot of various coalitions directed at breaking the "reds" (the United Opposition, Depos I, Depos II, Zajedno) and it was also generous when making agreements, but vengeful when breaking them.

Thus, the politicians of both sides know how to make deals, and yet even more easily break them. In this relativness of their understanding of deals, there's one thing that is not necessarily bad: the fact that these coalition governments are more unstable and weaker as a rule than the one-party ones, and that this may be the beginning of the end of the "non-replaceable" government.

The possibility of creating such a centralist coalition between SPS and SPO is conditional on the achievement of a programmatic agreement on the national renaissance, but on the other hand, scarcely anyone here cares about declarations - almost everyone believes that programs are just rhetorical curtains behind which mandates are distributed. Both history and the present agree with the Comediographer.

Serbia still does not have stabile institutions representing a morally responsible public that are capable of forcing those working for the nation to do their job for the national good, and not for personal benefits. In such an environment, with no responsibility nor efficient public control, the cleptocratic layer can calmly keep on getting richer in a half-destroyed country.