BIG BLOC OF SERBIA'S DEMOCRATIC VOTERS

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 04 BELGRADE 002061

SIPDIS

SENSITIVE
SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: PGOV PREL KDEM SR
SUBJECT: BIG BLOC OF SERBIA'S DEMOCRATIC VOTERS
STILL UNDECIDED ABOUT ELECTIONS

SUMMARY
--------------

1. (SBU) Early election forecasts from Serbia's
major polling agencies suggest that the
ultranationalist Radical and Socialist parties
have little chance of forming a government alone
after the 21 January elections. Pollsters
indicate that President Tadic's Democratic Party
(DS) and PM Kostunica's Democratic Party of
Serbia (DSS) will be in a position to form the
core of a democratic government, if they can put
aside their differences. The more than 20 percent
of certain voters who have yet to decide for whom
to vote are ripe for the picking by democratic
parties, but have not responded to the DS's still
somewhat unfocused campaign. G17 Plus and the
upstart Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have been
the fastest out of the blocks, but face tougher
sledding once the DS and DSS start throwing a lot
of money into their campaigns after New Year's.
We have not seen any electoral bounce for the
democrats from the PfP invitation. End Summary.

THE EARLY NUMBERS
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2. (U) Serbia's most reliable polling agencies--
the Center for Free Elections and Democracy
(CeSID),Medium Gallup, Scan, and Strategic
Marketing (SMMRI)--have recently conducted public
opinion surveys that provide a somewhat clearer
picture of the prospects of the main contenders
in the 21 January parliamentary elections. The
following are their current survey results
measuring the parties' percentage of support from
determined voters:

PARTY CeSID Gallup Scan SMMRI

SRS 30 30 28 32
DS 27 25 25 27
DSS/NS 20 19 17 17
G17 Plus 8 8 5 8
LDP-led coalition 4 5 9 5
SPS 4 6 4 5
SPO 4 3 3 3


3. (SBU) Medium Gallup chief Srbobran Brankovic,
Scan chief Milka Puzigaca, and Strategic
Marketing head Srdjan Bogosavljevic all
complained to Poloffs about the manipulation of
their agencies' polling data in the press.
Puzigaca alleged a malicious campaign to
discourage voters inclined toward the DS by
inflating SRS and DSS party ratings and also to
demotivate LDP-inclined voters by falsely
suggesting that the LDP was unlikely to pass the
five-percent election census. The opposite
motivation may have been behind a recent press
article in the Blic daily citing G17 Plus ratings
of 11 percent, a clear inflation of its current
popularity. Brankovic also blamed journalists'
limited capacity to interpret and weigh raw
polling data, which he says may have accounted
for some press articles that falsely cited Medium
Gallup polls placing the DSS coalition ahead of
the DS. (A DSS insider close to the PM cited to
us on 12/20 the DSS' belief that a Medium Gallup
poll placed it ahead of the DS.)

TURNOUT AND UNDECIDED VOTERS
--------------

4. (U) Bogosavljevic and CeSID Executive
Director Zoran Lucic both project that at least
3.7 million voters, or 55 percent of the
electorate, will go to the polls, only a marginal
decline from the turnout in Serbia's two previous
parliamentary elections in 2000 and 2003.
Brankovic and Puzigaca, however, told Poloffs
that only 47-50 percent of the electorate is
virtually certain to vote, with a higher turnout
dependent on weather conditions and, perhaps most
of all, the success of party campaigns to
motivate their voters. Puzigaca was especially
concerned that scheduling the elections on 21
January--the last day of Serbian children's
winter break--will disproportionately hurt the DS
and the LDP coalition because their more urban,
educated voters may not return home from vacation
in time to vote. As a result, she believes
predicting the turnout for these elections is a
fool's errand, particularly since the series of

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holidays that Serbia will have from New Year's to
election day makes capturing a reliable sample of
voters during that time virtually impossible.


5. (U) Strategic Marketing and Medium Gallup
assess that around 20 percent of certain voters
still have not decided which party to support,
while CeSID's survey indicates that more than
one-third of likely voters remain undecided. Most
undecided voters are strongly inclined toward
parties in Serbia's so-called democratic bloc,
which underscores the importance of these
parties' campaigns in getting out the vote, they
said. Moreover, the bloc of democratic voters
that Bogosavljevic defines as "progressive" are
more undecided and more prone to abstention than
those voters he defines as "conservative
democrats," who gravitate especially toward DSS.
This relatively high number of undecided voters
lends considerable unpredictability to the
elections, since the campaigns of the biggest
parties are not likely to go into high gear until
after New Year's. In essence, the main campaign
battles are likely to be waged in an intense week
starting on 9 January, just after Orthodox
Christmas weekend, and ending with the
preelection silence on 18 January.

DSS YET TO PEEL OFF POPULIST-ORIENTED RADICAL
VOTERS
-------------- --------------

6. (SBU) Lucic views the efforts of the populist
coalition led by Prime Minister Kostunica's DSS
to win away nationalist-oriented voters from the
camp of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) as the
central battle of the election campaign. The DSS
and its main coalition partner New Serbia (NS)
hope that Radical leader Vojislav Seselj's
efforts from The Hague to recommit the party
leadership to his Greater Serbia platform and to
mute the party's less strident voices will enable
them to siphon off populist votes from the SRS.
NS leader Velimir Ilic in particular is
reportedly going into Radical villages throughout
Serbia carrying the unambiguous message that the
DSS-NS coalition will hold onto power after
elections and direct future capital investments
only to those municipalities that demonstrate
fealty to them in the elections. DSS insiders
have told us that a major battle against the SRS
for nationalist votes is shaping up throughout
Sumadija.


7. (SBU) The jury is still out as to whether the
DSS can significantly steal away support from the
SRS, which retains the strongest base of
determined voters. Strategic Marketing's
Bogosavljevic indicates that 32 percent of
determined voters and 35 percent of likely voters
support the Radicals, while Lucic judges that the
SRS could win as much as 38 percent of the vote
if turnout is low. Both Bogosavlejvic and
Puzigaca told Poloffs that the SRS's voters
remain loyal and determined to vote, despite the
party's still-dormant campaign and the DSS's
nationalist pandering.


8. (SBU) The pollsters disagree somewhat about
the DSS's overall election prospects. Medium
Gallup results suggest that support for the DSS
coalition could top out at 20 percent and is
likely, if anything, to decline as elections draw
nearer. CeSID's Lucic also believes that the
DSS's efforts to appeal to its national-
conservative base and to soft SRS supporters--and
its affiliation with crude populists like Ilic
and especially Dragan "Palma" Markovic--can only
win the party a limited number of additional
votes because at the same time it will lose a
portion of its urban, educated bloc of voters
either to the DS or to abstention. Puzigaca and
Bogosavljevic, however, assess that Ilic offers
significant potential upside to Kostunica, giving
his DSS access to votes in NS strongholds in
central Serbia that it would otherwise not have.
Puzigaca also points out that the DSS has managed
to increase its number of certain voters by 17
percent since September, probably because of the
adoption of the constitution and Kostunica's
relentless Kosovo-related rhetoric. This increase
is almost identical to the increase in Strategic

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Marketing polling after the adoption of the
constitution in the percentage of voters who see
Serbia moving "on the right track," which
suggests potentil traction for Kostunica's
"national unity" messge. A close advisor to
President Tadic expressedworry to us earlier
this week, however, that theDSS strategy of
targeting the nationalist vote pu it in a strong
position to surpass the DS.

D STRUGGLING TO MOTIVATE VOTERS
--------------

9. (SBU) Support for Serbian President Tadic's
Democratic Party actually outpaces that of the
SRS in Scan's survey of the electorate as a
whole, although the SRS enjoys an edge among
certain voters. The DS therefore stands to gain
significantly with a higher turnout. All four
pollsters agree, however, that the DS's failure
so far to promote a clear and concrete campaign
message is only serving to confuse and demotivate
its potential voters. Brankovic told Poloffs that
the numbers are unambiguous: Tadic should be
aggressively highlighting the differences between
the Democrats and the Radicals and projecting a
clear idea of what a DS-led government would
offer. Instead, Tadic continues to run as
President and to make state visits abroad at the
expense of a sustained campaign at home, and
carefully downplays the differences between the
DS and his likely DSS coalition partner. Tadic's
plan to "allow" Kostunica to be prime minister
again, even if the DS wins more votes, is the
worst-kept secret in the campaign and is sapping
morale in the party. We have not seen any
electoral bounce for the democrats from the PfP
invitation. At a 12/20 focus group observed by
Emboff, not a single one of the ten respondents
was aware of the PFP invitation or could describe
what PFP is.


10. (SBU) Bogoslavjevic (who is the main DS
pollster and works closely with IRI and NDI)
believes that the DS could even outpoll the
Radicals, given Tadic's personal popularity and
the contradictions in the DSS coalition. Our
sources, however, continue to note fractiousness
within the DS, with the campaign effort
resembling Tadic's dysfunctional personal office
and its duplicative titles, overlapping
functions, and a preference for splashy spin over
work in the trenches. The result is a lack of
message discipline. Marko Djurisic, head of the
DS's executive committee, admitted to Poloffs
that the party is struggling to promote a
coherent party program and risks confusing voters
as it tries to broaden its appeal beyond its
existing voting body.


11. (SBU) The coalition led by Cedomir
Jovanovic's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) stands
to gain the most from a flaccid DS campaign. The
LDP has the greatest potential in Vojvodina,
where Puzigaca says a small number of DS voters
were disenchanted by the party's support for the
constitution, which granted the province very
restricted autonomy. Recent Scan polling results,
in fact, show the LDP coalition with 15 percent
support in Vojvodina. All pollsters agree that
the LDP's biggest obstacle is convincing
sympathetic voters that their votes for LDP will
not be wasted, a perception which could become a
self-fulfilling prophecy. In response, its
coalition cleverly seized on published Scan
polling results showing the LDP at 9 percent,
with campaign posters promising that "9% is only
the beginning." Scan, however, is the only major
polling agency showing the LDP coalition
definitively above the 5 percent election hurdle,
with the other pollsters identifying a base of
180,000 voters firmly in the LDP camp but not yet
enough undecided voters inclined to vote for them
who could put them over the hump.

THREE OTHER PARTIES VYING TO CROSS ELECTION
CENSUS
-------------- --------------
-

12. (SBU) Only G17 Plus is safely above the
margin of error for crossing the five-percent
threshold in Medium Gallup and Strategic

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Marketing surveys. G17 Plus was the fastest party
out of the blocks, but both Brankovic and
Bogosavljevic expect the party's numbers to
decline closer to the election census once the
bigger parties start investing a lot more money
into their campaigns. Brankovic still expects G17
Plus in the end to cross the threshold because
party leader Mladjan Dinkic is mounting the most
energetic campaign, the party is flush with
money, and the powerhouse US election consulting
firm Greenberg Research has helped the party
prepare an effective, focused campaign strategy.


13. (SBU) Longtime nemeses SPS and SPO are the
only other parties that appear to have a shot at
crossing the five percent census. Most pollsters
rate the SPS's chances of squeaking past the
threshold as good because the party avoided
fracturing after its recent party congress and
has a stable voting body that is certain to make
it to the polls. The SPO, on the other hand, is
very much a long shot, suffering even more than
the LDP from the perception that a vote for the
party is a wasted vote. Strategic Marketing and
Medium Gallup, meanwhile, separately estimate
that the minority Hungarian, Bosniak, and
Albanian parties--which only have to cross a
"natural" threshold of 13,000-16,000 votes,
depending on turnout--will together secure 7-9
seats in the next parliament.

COMMENT
--------------

14. (SBU) These results from Serbia's most
respectable pollsters indicate that it is
unlikely that the ultranationalist SRS and SPS
would be able to form a government on their own
after elections. At the same time, the early
polling numbers suggest that the combination of
an unfavorable date for elections, the DS's
muddled, uninspiring election campaign, and the
DSS's populist pandering pose the risk of
discouraging a huge bloc of democratically-
inclined Serbian voters. Conversely, in a best-
case scenario, the failure of both the DS and DSS
campaigns to elicit support beyond their bases or
even to avoid estranging parts of their voting
bodies could help G17 and LDP cross the election
census and thereby swell the ranks of pro-
Western, reform-oriented parties in the next
parliament.

POLT