Low voter turnout nullifies vote in Serbia-Montenegro

BELGRADE, Serbia and Montenegro -- Serbia was left in institutional limbo here on Saturday night after it failed for a third time in just over a year to elect a new president.

Just more than 38 percent of the republic's 6.5 million voters took part in the election, far less than the 50 percent required by law for the vote to be valid.

The failure of the election means that the republic of Serbia, which with Montenegro used to form Yugoslavia until it changed its name to Serbia and Montenegro earlier this year, has neither a president nor a parliament. The parliament was dissolved on Thursday, with new elections planned for December.

Without a parliament, there is no authority to call a new presidential election, meaning that Serbs will have to wait until the New Year before another can be organized. Most analysts say that reform of the electoral laws is likely to be one of the new assembly's first tasks.

The coalition government was disbanded after Prime Minister Zoran Zivkovic said that internal divisions in the administration meant that it could no longer pursue a program of reform.

The 18-party governing coalition successfully ousted the former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, in elections three years ago. After the assassination of the Serbian prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, in March, the already divided administration has struggled to remain in office.

Commentators said on Sunday that one reason for the failure of the election was that two major political groups -- the Democratic Party of Serbia and the pro reform lobby, G17 -- had called for a boycott. Coupled with the fact that the electorate was already disillusioned, they said, the election failed to attract enough voters to make it valid.

"It was absolutely predictable," said Ognjen Pribicevic, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Social Studies in Belgrade. "Nobody serious expected the election to be successful."

The two parties' boycott of the vote, announced well ahead of the election and designed to put pressure on the government to call December's parliamentary elections, appeared to play into the hands of the opposition nationalists.

The hard-line presidential candidate, Tomislav Nikolic, won more than 46 percent of votes cast, despite opinion polls before the election predicting victory for the reformist candidate, Dragoljub Micunovic a 73-year-old former dissident.

With 17 percent of voters allied with Nikolic's Serbian Radical Party, it is considered likely to do well in December's general election. His group is opposed to cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague. Cooperation with the tribunal is a precondition for aid from both the United States and the European Union.

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