2005-09-28

A disturbing public opinion survey

A survey released today, commissioned by the British government and carried out by CeSID, suggests that if elections were held now, the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) would get 38%, the Democratic Party (DS) would get 31%, The Democratic party of Serbia (DSS) 9% and Bogoljub Karić's Forza Serbia (PSS) 8%. No other parties would get enough to support to gain representation in the parliament. The results are believable, in the sense that they are consistent with recent election results and other survey findings, and also with the expected erosion of support for the parties currently in power. CeSID also has a decent record of reliable research. Some time will probably pass before elections are called, of course, which means that the balance of forces could change, but not in a direction which would necessarily be predictable.

Assuming for a moment that the results would be as the survey indicates, this would mean: 1) once more there would be pressure for DS and DSS to form a coalition, which would certainly be hugely unstable, and 2) assuming the (not necessarily very likely) coalition mentioned in 1) is formed, the government would still be formed by whoever gets PSS to join the coalition, which means that Karić would be able to demand a very high price for his support. If the government were to be formed by a coalition of DS-DSS-PSS, it would be mostly incapable of action. If it were to be formed by SRS and PSS, the results would be disastrous for everybody both inside and outside the government. If DSS were to try to stay out of coalitions, this would leave an unstable minority government and also possibly the demise of DSS. There is always the possibility of a SRS-DSS coalition, which has been raised in various ways by DSS officials at various times, but would certainly be very controversial both in the party and outside of it. It might seem unreal, but then consider that SPS is keeping DSS in power now.

No matter how one tries to add up the numbers, they would not seem to mean anything good.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's all very nice, but the next elections should be in 2008, rendering analysis a little premature. :D

Eric Gordy said...

That's possible, so far Kostunica's government has managed to avoid having to call new elections, even in its fairly weak position. In that case surveys like this would help, in the sense that the fear of SRS sustains the current crew (especially internationally). That and also, G17 realizes that this government is their first and last chance at power, so they will not jump ship no matter what happens. On the other hand ... SPS is still strong enough to force new elections by withdrawing its support. Right now they are getting everything they want, but if there is a weak link that is it.

Anonymous said...

what I want to know is how londonac got his/he username to show up in cyrillic!

Anonymous said...

Ево, видим сада како да то радим!

Eric Gordy said...

The magic of Unicode? Or something more complicated?

Anonymous said...

not sure, I just used the language bar function in windows xp, changed my keyboard to Serbian-cyrillic, and went at it!

شمسكككشكطثهلعش
\
Not sure what that says, but it's in Algerian Arabic...