Parties left out of parliament "unlikely to survive"

Parties left out of parliament "unlikely to survive"

BELGRADE -- An analyst believes the parties left out of parliament - the DSS, the URS, and the LDP - will have a hard time attempting to survive on the political scene.

These parties each won less than five percent of the votes cast on Sunday and will have no seats in the country's new parliament, thus losing the funding they receive from the state and from their own donors, and will find it difficult to survive until the next election, Vladimir Goati has said.

Speaking on Monday, he noted that "even if they do survive they won't have big chances in the next election, because they will not be funded for four years."

Apart from the lack of money, Goati sees another major problem in a "dissipating membership."

"Enthusiasm is a good friend, but not long-lasting. Officials will not work without pay," said the analyst, and added that "donors will also withdraw under these circumstances, because they usually finance a party they can benefit from - that is, one that's in power."

Goati further expects parties that did not pass the threshold and have similar programs "to unite," as the Serb Radicals and the Naši Movement did before the election.

He described Mlađan Dinkić's URS as "heterogeneous" and said he did not expect it to continue in its current form. Instead, he thinks its members "will each seek their luck elsewhere."

Goati said the DSS would find it hard to return to parliament "if it does not step back from its policies and replaces leader Vojislav Koštunica, who has led the party since 1992."

He added that Čedomir Jovanović's LDP "has a program chance of being more radical than the DS in a...