Serbs vote for closer ties with Europe in huge turnaround:
Serbs voted for closer ties with Europe instead of isolation for the second time in three months in Sunday's snap parliamentary poll, in a stunning turnaround that negated pre- election surveys. A pro-European coalition led by President Boris Tadic won the most votes, claiming 39 per cent of the ballots cast, overtaking the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party as the largest group in parliament, the private election monitoring agency Cesid said.
Even the best of them all, the LDP, won some seats in the Parliament:
Basing its projection on a sample of some 400 key polling stations among 8,600, the traditionally reliable Cesid said another pro- European group, the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP), won 5.2 per cent of the votes, qualifying for parliament.
A couple of weeks ago when I was in Belgrade, I watched a couple of TV debates and I was impressed at the high level of discourse. All the candidates treated the audience as intelligent and educated and explained their plans in great detail. And they were given plenty of time to do it by the TV moderators whose job was to gently steer the debate and not to grandstand like the BigHeads here do. Even the worst rightwingers explained their proposals in complex sentences and made their plans appear logically coherent. It was up to their opponents from the Left to demonstrate why such proposals, though seemingly attractive, are unworkable in practice or just plain wrong - and it appears that the audience, being intelligent and educated, understood the arguments and voted accordingly.
I wish we could have such a high level of political discourse in the media in the USA....
