Milan Milutinovic, the presidential candidate of Serbia’s ruling Socialist Party, was heading for victory in Sunday’s polling, but independent observers and the opposition Radical Party accused the authorities of rigging the vote.
Three earlier rounds of voting since September had failed to produce an outright winner to succeed Slobodan Milosevic, who was barred by the constitution from running for a third term and switched to the federal Yugoslav presidency in July.
Ivica Dacic, a Socialist party spokesman, said that with 98 percent of polling stations processed, Milutinovic was leading with 59.7 percent of the vote in the runoff against Vojislav Seselj, leader of the ultranationalist Radical party.
A senior government official said privately that the Socialists were confident the international community would turn a blind eye to ballot-box stuffing if this was the price of denying victory to Seselj, a former paramilitary leader who has been denounced as a fascist by the U.S. envoy to the Balkans.
Serbia’s undisputed strongman for the last 10 years, Milosevic needed his ally installed as president of the Republic of Serbia to consolidate his new position, which, in theory, is largely ceremonial. Milosevic’s Socialist Party has lost its majority in the Serbian parliament, although it remains the largest party represented, and also faces opposition from the newly elected reformist president of Montenegro, which with Serbia makes up what is left of Yugoslavia.
Foreign officials said they had been told privately by the Republican Electoral Commission that the turnout in the Serbian election would exceed the crucial 50 percent threshold needed to validate the result.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe described the previous round of voting two weeks ago as “fundamentally flawed.” This time, it appeared to be even worse, independent Serbian observers said.
Fraud by the Socialists in local elections a year ago triggered three months of mass protests by supporters of a coalition of centrist parties. Belgrade analysts doubted that Seselj would choose such an option because he cannot command a critical mass of people in major cities.
Seselj said his supporters had been beaten up and prevented from observing the polls in the southern province of Kosovo, whose ethnic Albanian majority has largely boycotted Serbian elections for the last eight years.
The U.S.-funded Center for Free Elections and Democracy, which deployed more than 700 observers, reported police harassment and multiple voting in several areas. At one polling station in Vranje, directors of a Socialist-run factory were alleged to have watched over their workers as they voted.
People who did not turn up at polling stations received visits and telephone calls from Socialist party officials who told them it was their “patriotic duty” to vote.
“We have seen all forms of irregularities,” said Marko Blagojevic, a spokesman for the Center for Free Elections and Democracy. His center estimated the turnout at 48 to 48.5 percent, but state media indicated the turnout would be more than 50 percent, even in Kosovo.
In September, the Socialists failed to win a majority of the parliament, thereby forcing a presidential election. Seselj defeated the previous Socialist candidate in a Oct. 5 election but was denied the victory because the turnout was just short of 50 percent. After a rerun of the elections two weeks ago, Seselj trailed Milutinovic, the Yugoslav foreign minister, by a considerable margin of 440,000 votes, partly due to alleged ballot stuffing in Kosovo.
