Serbia's UN Candidate Wins Western Media Support

Days before the fifth vote in the UN Security Council for the post of Secretary General on September 26, Serbia's candidate, Vuk Jeremic, is winning support from important Western media outlets as the best candidate.

Despite the praise, a foreign policy expert for the Serbian newspaper Politika, Bosko Jaksic, told BIRN that Jeremic would probably not be elected.

"Jeremic has achieved huge personal and diplomatic success but it is questionable whether he has a chance of being elected ... He got support from the Serbian government too late for his candidacy," Jaksic remarked.

Britain's conservative-leaving Daily Telegraph wrote on 19 September that Jeremic "wants to shake up the sclerotic organization" and that, unlike the other candidates, has produced a detailed platform that contains 53 specific commitments, which he intends to implement.

In another opinion article, entitled "Who will run UN", published in the Wall Street Journal on 18 September, Jeremic was again lauded as the best person for the position.

"At 41, the Harvard-educated Mr Jeremic is young, but he was a leader of the social movement that helped topple Slobodan Milosevic's dictatorship in Belgrade in 2000. He later served in the pro-Western government of Boris Tadic, who in 2010 issued a historic Serbian apology for the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica," the article said.

After the fifth vote in the Security Council, a sixth round will be held in October and at that vote, the five permanent members of the Security Council will cast votes.

Those candidates that receive two or three negative votes from representatives of the permanent members of Security Council will cease to be candidates.

Talks on the winning candidate will...