Based on their survey of voter preferences, CeSid is predicting that SRS candidate Tomislav Nikolić will have a slight edge in the first round of voting for the Serbian presidency, but that the shift of voters from the other candidates would mean reelection for DS candidate Boris Tadić in the second round.
Another interesting finding from the survey is that a large number of voters from the smaller parties are not intending to support their party's candidates: 73% of LDP voters say they will vote for Tadić instead of Čedomir Jovanović, 43%of DSS-NS voters prefer Tadić over their candidate Velimir Ilić, while some proportion of SPS voters and 2% of DSS voters say they will vote for Nikolić.
Increasingly (as Nikolić himself predicted), there are two political blocs in Serbia: one represented most strongly by DS, and the other represented most strongly by SRS. There are two main consequences of smaller parties putting forward candidates with no hope of winning in the first round: 1) to make SRS appear to be more popular than it really is, and 2) to give Koštunica power as a broker that is out of proportion with the support that his party enjoys and inconsistent with the preferences of most of his party's members. But there is another dimension here as well: DS also relies on the support of other parties because it cannot turn out its own supporters. While 74% of SRS voters say they will vote for Nikolić, only 60% of DS voters say they will vote for Tadić.
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2 comments:
Eric, if I'm reading it correctly, 73% of LDP voters will vote for Tadić in the second round, so it's not "instead" of Jovanović. They will (presumably) still vote for Čeda in the first round.
In my humble opinion, this time is as good as ever to have Nikolić win and get over it. Recently, I started believing again in that theory that if Radicals come to power for a year or so, they will do so badly that they will lose all voters. President's office being the least bad place for their playground, that may be benign enough. Then again, their votes would probably shift to DSS or such...
Did I make that mistake? That's embarrassing.
The "let the Radicals win so it kills them" theory seems to circulate around every election. On the one hand, that could happen (though I doubt they are likely to win). But on the other hand, the risk that it could turn out another way seems fairly large.
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