Pretender To The Title Of Leader

" At those elections Seselj won 100,000 votes, even though he admitted at the time that the Serbian Chetnik Movement did not have more than 10,000 members, if it had that many. "Whoever wins ten times more votes than he has party members, must have a promising political future in Serbia," concluded the above mentioned colleague then.

Ahead of the 1990 elections, Belgrade was prone to make fun of a small group of Chetnik-like fanatics, who held rallies, even one during a snowstorm in front of Zagreb restaurant (now the Russian Tsar) in the city center. The city amused itself with stories of fights among Chetniks with baseball bats. At the time Seselj was described and perceived as a "grotesque figure," a disappointed man and the youngest holder of a D.Sc. diploma in Communist Yugoslavia, who instead of following a promising University career, became the most famous Yugoslav inmate. Just before the 1990 elections, Seselj found himself in jail again for drawing up lists of volunteers for Knin, and it is remembered that he signed his presidential candidacy accompanied by a jail warden in front of members of the republican elections committee. After signing, Seselj was taken back to jail.

In an interview given a few days ahead of this year's elections, Vojislav Seselj claimed that his Radical Party had more than 100,000 members, something few believed. However, election results show that where Seselj is concerned the saying "ten against one" still holds. According to all assessments, the Radical Party has won over one million votes this time, making nonsense of all election forecasts from pub know-alls to public opinion polls. This time Seselj's victory was not a "moral" one, but a real one.

Commenting the first election returns and the Radical's success, who, instead of the forecast 15% deputy places won nearly 30%, one of the Democratic Party leaders Zoran Djindjic said that the matter "bordered with the fantastic."

Only later analysis of the recent elections will show how it happened that Seselj once again passed by the radars undetected, surprising even those who considered him their "reserve echelon." It seems that all sought the Radicals where they could not find them - in a strong and mass-based party. But, they were not to be found there, if exception is taken to the well organized and publicly not too exposed nucleus of the party (in spite of claims of 100,000 members). This is why there were very many of them where they were least expected - in the organs of authority, the police apparatus, among officers.

Those who voted for Seselj and the Radicals were mostly those who identified them with authority, wishing for its more radical variant. Researchers have not failed in the fact that the SPS and SRS electoral bodies overlap in 70% cases, i.e. that it is practically one and the same electoral body. Had the Radicals abstained from the elections, the SPS would have won 75% votes instead of the present 40%-odd. The opposite also holds true. The rather numerous, and judging by all, scattered Radical followers, include a great number of those who passed through the SPS and were disappointed by its "slowness" to speedily and once and for all "resolve" the Serbian national question. They turned to those who always have simple, speedy "victorious" solutions and have always promulgated the idea of "all Serbs in one state," and not only on special occasions. The Radicals won the confidence of those who feel empty and defeated by the present situation and cannot understand what is happening to them, and are ready to accept explanations which bring back illusions of greatness. The growing slum proletariat is included here, as well as those who choose out of desperation and those who have tasted war and discovered for the first time in their lives, through various paramilitary armies, uniforms and ranks, their sense of importance. We can include here thousands of those for whom the only effective political marketing is summed up in the message "the Radicals are where the Serbian lands are," and in photographs of a uniformed Voivoda walking through the mud and blood of battlefields. Seselj's option was upheld by the majority of 230,000 refugees entered in electoral lists and by a number of those who reacted with defiance to the West's clumsy insistence on the Serbs' being the sole guilty party.

After the 1990 elections, prior to which Milosevic sent him to jail, and after these, which have landed him firmly on his feet as an undisputed political power in both Parliaments, Seselj was the first politician to congratulate President Slobodan Milosevic on his victory. At that time he was an unsuccessful presidential candidate, now he is a possible coalition partner and potential Minister of Defence or Interior Minister. Even the possibility of a prime ministership is being mentioned.

Even though they are officially at opposite ends of the Serbian political scene (one is allegedly leftist, the other rightist), Milosevic and Seselj are natural political partners who hold each other in esteem. After the 1990 elections, Seselj has not criticized the authorities. The key sentence in understanding the nature of SPS-SRS relations, and in the resolving of dilemmas regarding a coalition between these two parties, is contained in the words spoken by Seselj in May 1992, when he said 'We cooperate with the SPS and greet its efforts to change. Concerning criticism that we are leaning to much towards the SPS, I claim that we have not changed anything in our program, but perhaps others are leaning towards us.' In his post-election interview, given to the Belgrade daily "Vecernje Novosti" from his hospital bed (he refused to be photographed, saying that lying in bed was not worthy of a Chetnik Voivoda), Seselj revealed what his party would promote in the future, and said what his party would demand of its political partners. '... The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia will first have to recognize the two Serbian states (the Serbian Republic in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Republic of Serbian Krajina - ed. comment). Then it will bring a sovereign decision on their joining Yugoslavia as two federal units.'

Milosevic has never said anything unfavorable about Seselj. Their only clash, an indirect one, resulted after the Serbian authorities' decision to jail Seselj temporarily in October 1990. Since then, Seselj has gone down in the history of the Serbian Philosophical Society as the first member to be excluded with the explanation that "no philosopher in Serbia had ever called for killing, and that a member of the Society cannot uphold fascist ideas." In May 1991 in Valjevo, Seselj said openly that members of his party were armed and that they had been buying weapons abroad, something which is still forbidden today. Seselj threatened Macedonians with mass retaliation, and promised demonstrators in Sarajevo that they would be 'punished under a decision by competent organs in his party'. Seselj was the first politician to publicly flaunt weapons on TV and, explaining the effect of the Thompson automatic rifle, said that 'the victim's eyes popped out his head' on being hit. In the Serbian Parliament Seselj insisted on the expulsion of Croats (on the retortion principle), promising to carry through such a program if he came to power. He went for his gun on Belgrade streets on several occasions, or watched his bodyguards doing so. All of Seselj's moves are incompatible with any variant of the Socialist idea urged by Slobodan Milosevic, but he reacted only once - in March 1991, when he said in an interview that of all opposition leaders he had the highest opinion of the SRS leader, and the inheritor of the Serbian Chetnik Movement, because he was 'consistent in expressing his political views', and because 'he and his party were financially independent of help from abroad'.

At the time, certain analysts noticed that Serbia was the only country in which such publicly stated sentiments did not result in detrimental consequences for the head of state. At the time Seselj was being compared to Le Pen and many wondered at what would have happened had Socialist leader Mitterrand publicly praised the "consistency" of France's extreme rightist. But, Serbia is not France, and Slobodan Milosevic is not Mitterrand, and Seselj is not Le Pen. In his heyday, Le Pen won "only" 10%-15% votes of the entire electorate. Regardless of earlier underestimations and some current dilemmas concerning the true political orientation of the Serbian Radicals, it is becoming increasingly clear that Seselj has stepped into the once vacant lot of the Serbian right, retaining at the same time much of his extremism. Today, when his party has 30%-odd places in the Serbian and Federal parliaments (percentage-wise more than the extreme right anywhere in Europe), Seselj has definitely left the political sidelines. He is no longer a marginal figure and it is his opponents who can be accused of inconsistency, fickleness and an incompetency to formulate a real alternative to the current pernicious authorities in Serbia. With Seselj in power, there is perhaps no democratic future for Serbia, but it is also a fact that no developments will take place without him and his followers.

Srbobran Brankovic, of the Institute of Political Studies, gives another vital element necessary to the understanding of the SRS election success and widespread identification of its goals with those of the SPS, which is what happened at these elections. "If the first election results are to be believed, a time is coming when Seselj will be dangerously close to his paragon. It remains to be seen if this will whet his political appetites, and how Milosevic will take to this uncomfortable rival and the dangerous proximity of someone whom until recently he found amusing, at the most."

Milosevic-Seselj, A Parallel

The "Medium" agency measures the rating of political figures on a scale of -2 to +2. The mark -2 means that the pollee has a very bad opinion of the political figure in question, -1 (medium bad), 0 (neither bad nor good), 1 (medium good), 2 (very good). After this, the average mark for each political figure is calculated, giving the public's political opinion, but not the number of followers. A parallel trend has been noticed in the popularity ratings of Milosevic and Seselj.