retained their dominance in Bosnia Herzegovina despite calls to church leaders to back moderate forces, while rightwing groups also made inroads in Serbia and Slovenia.
After 12 years of nearly continuous control, Slovenian Prime Minister Anton Rop admitted his Liberal Democrats suffered a heavy loss to center-right parties in the tiny alpine state’s first general elections since it became a member of the European Union and NATO earlier this year.
But despite disagreements with the embattled prime minister, the Slovenian Democratic Party of former Defense Minister Janez Jansa , which is expected to form a right-leaning coalition, has promised "it will not change" major policy decisions, such as Slovenia’s intention to adopt the euro in 2007, and to move toward privatizing large state-owned companies in the telecommunications, insurance, banking and energy sectors.
In Serbia, initial results show that allies of ousted President Slobodan Milosevic won in several key regions, including the post of mayor in Novi Sad, the capital of the northern Vojvodina province.
Neighboring Hungary fears the election outcome could fuel ethnic tensions as leaders of Vojvodina’s estimated 350,000-strong ethnic Hungarian minority have complained about a number of violent attacks and the desecration of cemeteries.
"ATROCITIES"
Outgoing Hungarian Foreign Minister Laszlo Kovacs even spoke of "atrocities" against ethnic Hungarians in the troubled region, a statement that has angered the Belgrade government. However, in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, a more moderate pro-Western reformer, won the mayoral race over his Serbian Radical Party opponent.
Analysts say the Radical party has made significant gains in recent years, particularly in Vojvodina.
As the largest single faction in the Serbian parliament, it poses strong opposition to the more pro-Western centrist government.
Life was also not expected to get better for minorities in neighboring Bosnia Herzegovina, where initial results revealed that the three main nationalist parties are leading in Saturday’s first locally funded and locally organized municipal elections since the 1992-1995 war.
It came as a set back for democracy organizations such as the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights which accused religious leaders of Bosnian Muslims, Roman Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs of "directing" voters to the nationalists.
INDEPENDENT
But the moderate Union of Independent Social Democrats appears to have gained ground in a number of city elections against the Serb Democratic Party, which was founded by fugitive war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic.
Bosnia-Herzegovina has been made up of two entities, a Muslim-Croat federation and a Serb republic, since the end of the war, which killed a quarter of a million people. Several Christian organizations have tried to give spiritual counseling and humanitarian support to thousands of survivors, including Muslim women in Srebrenica, where up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred by Serb forces.
However over half of the Bosnian voters stayed away from the polls, amid public disappointment in elected officials, who so far failed to live up to their promises of improving living standards and creating jobs in the impoverished, ethnically divided, Balkan nation.
