2008-05-11

If at first you sort of succeed

The first projections from CeSID look fairly surprising: although the DS-led coalition and SRS appeared to be running about even in the preelection surveys, CeSID projects an advantage of over 10% for DS -- 103 seats to 76 for SRS. However, it will get more complicated. It takes 126 seats to form a government. DS can probably count on the 7 seats that minority parties are expected to get. LDP will have another 13, but DS wants to avoid dealing with them. So the coalition of DS + LDP + minorities gets at most 123 seats, three short of where they need to be.

That leaves two potential coalition partners who are at best undesirable: DSS with 30 seats and SPS with 21. SRS could form a weak government with their fellow recipients of DB largesse in SPS and DSS with 127 seats. Or DS could try to pick off one of them, at the cost of their capacity to govern.

Look for a lot of things that will be euphemistically called incentives that will be used to encourage individual deputies from SPS and DSS to switch their loyalties.

And in the meantime, be pleased that it will at least not be easy for SRS to return to power.

4 comments:

Mladen_M said...

Well, 123+ Palma's several MPs makes it over 125 ;-)

Alex said...

hmm... but don't parties own the mandates, can the bribery work? Or are you couting on some of the small parties in the DSS-NS coalition to leave the coalition?

Eric Gordy said...

Well, the two precedents I have in mind are the defection of Nova Demokratija from DEPOS and the invention of the SRS-Nikola Pasic.

Mladen_M said...

the later