Socialists fuffer setbacks in Eastern Europe

By Boris Kalnoky

BERLIN: Two years ago, the former communists in eastern Central Europe made a sensational comeback as socialists. From Poland to Bulgaria they were swept back into power on a wave of popular disappointment with economic restructuring. Now the pendulum has swung back in the other direction.

The presidential election in Bulgaria shows that the Socialists have slipped from just about 50 percent to well below 40 percent in just two years. The new president will be liberal lawyer Peter Stoyanov.

In Rumania, the Party of Social Democracy (PDSR), the successor party to the Communist Party, has lost power for the first time since dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown in 1989.

This time, they only gained between 22 and 25 percent of the vote. President Ion Iliescu, who is closely affiliated with the PDSR, now faces a run-off election from a weakened position.

He is running neck and neck against Emil Constantinescu of the Democratic Convention (CDR); at just over 30 percent, however, Iliescu looks like he has exhausted his vote-catching potential.

Meanwhile, in rump Yugoslavia, elections were held for the federal parliament of Serbia and Montenegro. As President Slobodan Milosevic's last term of office according to the Serb constitution expires at the end of 1997, he had to make the most of these elections.

A two-thirds majority for his Socialist Party and its coalition partners would enable him to continue ruling as head of the Yugoslav state. However, it was not all plain sailing for Milosevic either. The Socialists needed two partners to make it.

Early counts showed that Milosevic and his partners had won a comfortable 50 percent of the vote. In view of the first-past-the-post electoral system and the fact that the victorious Montenegrin Socialists will also be siding with him in the federal parliament, Milosevic should have enough votes to amend the federal constitution and redefine the hitherto purely formal office of president. He could then follow in Tito's footsteps at the end of January.

In all three countries, the Socialists have been using the people as a means to the end of retaining power for years. Now at any rate voters in Romania and Bulgaria seem to have realized that the hardship that goes with reform politics at least make a better future possible, whereas socialist leadership had only brought them economic disaster coupled with a lack of future perspectives.

In Bulgaria, the Socialists stymied any kind of consistent privatization policies between 1992 and 1994; premier Lyuben Berov's minority government was not able to push any of its proposals through.

When the reformed communists returned to power under premier Zhan Videnov, they reluctantly began a privatization process - though without any transparency and often in favor of old followers who were more interested in plundering the state sector than revamping moribund businesses.

Apart from ex-Yugoslavia, Romania is the only country in eastern Central Europe where the communists continued to rule without interruption up to today, though under another name.

In the thick of the revolutionary chaos of December 1989, a clique of Communists loyal to Moscow and to Ceausescu's former "Crown Prince" Iliescu seized power. In order to secure it, they mobilized pugnacious miners to tackle the democratic opposition three times in the first two years and won parliamentary elections twice.

They formed coalitions with right- and left-wing extremist parties, gave the nation a constitution without any property guarantee and made an enemy image of the Hungarian minority.

Economic reforms made painfully slow progress, mass privatization hesitantly began five years after the revolution. With the result that what was potentially the second largest market of the entire region (after Poland) atrophied, whilst neighboring countries like Hungary raced ahead into the new era.

A more mature electorate has now decided that the country does not need that sort of leadership. Iliescu was aware of this change of heart and presented himself in his election campaign as a pioneer of the market economy and as Hungary's best friend, at the same time brusquely dissociating himself from both neo- communists and nationalists.

Too late. He is left with the balance sheet of a brakeman of whom the people did not rid themselves until it was too late. For Iliescu or at least the forces which surrounded him, securing their own power was always more important that the well-being of the people.

This also holds for Milosevic. The war left Serbia with 250,000 refugees and a ruined economy, without any territorial gain. The Serbs fell even lower than the Bulgarians and the Romanians, for they were the best off of all the peoples in the region in 1989. The average monthly wage at that time was around 660 dollars, now it is around 200 dollars.

After the end of the sanctions, the leadership in Belgrade could have set about building up the economy again. However, the restructuring program proposed by Dragoslav Avramovic, the competent president of the Central Bank, was dropped because it entailed a general liberalization. In a pre-election climate, Milosevic wanted to avoid the social hardship this would have involved.

In terms of economic reform, Serbia is currently lagging six years behind, while Croatia is well on the way to having a functioning national economy.

Of the virtuosi in the art of manipulating peoples, Milosevic is certainly the most adept in the Balkans. Yet no matter whether he now becomes the Yugoslav head of state or changes the Serb constitution next year in order to remain in office for a third term, the Serb people will give him his come-uppance sooner or later.

-- The Guardian