The success of Tomislav Nikolic in the Serbia Presidential elections first round vote ahead of current President Boris Tadic is no surprise.

Points worth bearing in mind:

  • Serbia is not that big a place (some 10 million people including the Kosovo population). Some four million people voted. Nikolic came in first with 1.6 million.
  • Nikolic has a serious chance of winning in the run-off as he should pick up lumps of votes from the 500,000 supporters of Ilic and Mrkonjic, both towards the disgruntled/conservative/populist part of the Serbia voting spectrum. Tadic will mop up most of the 250,000 votes for Jovanovic. But will that be enough to close the gap?
  • US/European policy in the Balkans (and elsewhere) is oddly contradictory. We clamour for democracy but then often express disappointment with the results. We give the impression of assuming that deep in the forests and steep valleys of former Yugoslavia are hidden large armies of mild-mannered reasonable social democrats just itching at last to burst forth and vote for the European Highroad.
  • In fact the politicians in these countries have the voters they have, not the ones we’d like them to have.
  • These voters tend to vote fairly rationally. Their votes are skewed in a populist/nationalist direction not because they are inbred bigots but rather as a sort of political fire insurance – plenty of smoke and sparks still float around in the air there.
  • Former Bosnian President Izetbegovic once told me that Bosnia would be ready for ‘ethnic disarmament’ only in fifty years.
  • Which in practice means that if one uneasy ethnic community thinks that it needs to vote in the toughest available leader to help deal with other ethnic communities, those other communities say ‘Ah, I told you so’ and do the same.
  • Thus the Kosovar vote for Hashim Thaci as Prime Minister was sure to boost the chances of the Serbian leader presenting himself as most likely to stand up to the Albanians’ demands. As has happened, like clockwork.
  • We try to cut our way out of this conundrum by offering an alternative incentive structure to Serbia and Bosnia – ‘fast-track’ processes aimed at EU membership and so on. But we do it half-heartedly, inconsistently and on the cheap.
  • If you are eg a Serb donkey, which is more likely to motivate you? An admittedly sizeable juicy Euro-carrot tied to the end of a stick ten miles long, or the healthy-looking Albanian dog (fed plumply by EU taxpayers’ money) barking noisily nearby?
  • All that said, the rhetoric about Serbia and Russia having a mutual Slav love-in if Nikolic wins is unconvincing. Russians sniffily look down on Serbs as uppity country bumpkins speaking old-fashioned ‘church slavonic’. Serbs recall all too well the brutality of Soviet troops as they ‘liberated’ Serbia in WW2 and look back fondly to the days of Non-Alignment when Moscow was kept well away. 
  • A Nikolic run-off win nevertheless would be a set-back for the EU vision for dealing with the region in general and the Kosovo problem in particular. Serbia could start to look more like a truculent Balkan Belarus, a country in an ambiguous twilight space between ‘Modern Europe’ and Somewhere Else.
  • Moscow would be quietly pleased – the Russians do not want the Serbs, but they also do not want Europe to have them (in both cases for reasons not altogether flattering to the Serbs) 
  • Plus plenty of powerful gangsters in the region and on up into the former Soviet Union would think that such a result would be just fine.

People think the Balkans are complicated. They’re not. Like everywhere else, once you examine the incentive structure it all becomes very clear.