Garcevic Publishes Op-Ed on Voting Habits in the Balkans
Ambassador Vesko Garcevic, Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent Op-Ed examining the trend by Balkan voters to favor elected officials who are already in power despite their unpopularity.
Amb. Garcevic’s Op-Ed, entitled “Balkan Voters Cling to Governments They Don’t Love,” was published in Balkan Insight on March 12, 2018.
From the text of the Op-Ed:
The recent elections in Belgrade again confirmed that citizens in the Balkans do not love their governments – but vote for those who are in power.
When I was an ambassador of Serbia and Montenegro in Vienna, Vuk Draskovic, then Foreign Minister, told me an anecdote from “his glorious opposition times” when he had been the major opponent to Slobodan Milosevic’s regime in the early 1990s.
Campaigning in eastern Serbia, he recalled an encounter with a group of farmers who left him speechless with the logic of their argument as to why they would not vote for his Serbian Renewal Movement: we’ll vote for you the day you come to power, they said.
A few years ago, as a national coordinator for NATO in Montenegro, I was on a road show, visiting communities in Montenegro. Nothing struck me so deeply as the level of frustration that many people felt with their lives and futures. They did not trust the government and the ruling party. But they did not respect most of the other political actors in Montenegro, either. I would describe it as a chronic lack of optimism – and it has lasted for decades.
During his diplomatic career, Amb. Vesko Garcevic dealt with issues pertinent to European security and NATO for almost 14 years. In 2004, he was posted in Vienna to serve as Ambassador to Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He had been a Montenegro’s Ambassador to NATO from 2010 until 2014 and served as a Montenegro’s National Coordinator for NATO from 2015 until he joined the faculty at the Pardee School.