Svobodna Dnevnik

[Hadash]

El Correo Internacional

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Zvezdana Serebryak becomes Mordvanian President
By: Elena Manstein
Published: Quartyr 1, 1584


Serebryak defeated her rival with a tight result, becoming the first president of the Republic of Mordvania.

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Zvezdana Serebryak, the United Progressive Socialist Party leader, has defeated Bronislav Grazrod and she will become the first President of the Republic of Mordvania. Serebryak was formely Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1573 and 1576, and President of the Republican Council from 1576 to 1579. She will be president for a single six year term, as the Mordvanian constitution establishes that the president is not allowed to serve two full presidential terms.

Serebryak won 50.1% to 49.9%, a difference of barely more than one hundred thousand votes, to become the first elected civilian head of state. The office of the President of the Republic was established after the 1582 constitutional reform. Previously, the Mordvanian head of state was the Chairman of the Council of Defense, who was elected by universal suffrage but with more constitutional restrictions to be a candidate. The President of the Republic will replace the Chairman of the Council of Defense once Serebryak takes officially office, completing the final step established by the 1582 constitutional reform. The Council of Defense will turn into an advisory military body without executive powers.

While Grazrod had been leading all the polls for months, before and after the first round of the presidential elections, Serebryak was able to reduce the gap in the last three weeks. She won decisively the women, youth and ethnic minorities vote, and while Grazrod, a retired military general and former member of the Council of Defense, was voted by more than 70% of the Mordvanian Armed Forces and civil war veterans, this proved not enough. And although most political parties ended either endorsed Grazrod or issued ambiguous statements on the runoff vote, most of the left-republican Republican Social Radical Party were more likely to vote Serebryak according recent surveys, despite the candidate supported by the Republican Social Radical Party leadership for the first round, Vice-Chairman Gintaras Baravykas, had finally endorsed Grazrod for the second round.

Serebryak becomes the first elected civilian head of state in the country history, replacing Bozidar Strnad, a military officer who, as Chairman of the Council of Defense, had been the head of state of the Republic of Mordvania since 1566. Obviously, she will also become the first woman head of state with the only previous antecedent of the reign of Queen Brynja I, who ruled the Kingdom of Abdania and Mordvania from 1503 to 1511.

Bronislav Grazrod recognized his defeat only a few minutes before midnight, congratulating Serebryak and wishing her "good luck and competence to defend the interests of the Republic of Mordvania and its citizens". Despite the tense presidential campaign and their aggressive arguments in the last TV debate, Serebryak proposed Grazrod an advisory position in her administration, something that Grazrod has officially rejected.

Despite her victory, it is unclear the short-term consequences of the first president of the Republic of Mordvania. The 1582 constitutional reform reduced considerably the powers of the president compared to those granted to the Chairman of the Council of Defense, strengthening the parliament and Republican Council (national cabinet). Serebryak is not expected to have much influence in domestic politics for a while at least until the Septem 1585 legislative elections, as the Mordvanian parliament is currently dominated by centrist and center-right forces, and the Republican Council is under a right-leaning government coalition of the Mordvanian Republican Party and the Republican Liberal Party. Serebryak, who officially resigned as leader of the United Progressive Socialist Party seven months ago, has merely said that she will meet the President of the Republican Council Bogdan Privsek in the coming days, in order to discuss cooperation between the presidency and the Republican Council. While Serebryak promised during the electoral campaign she will not push for a change of government before the 1585 parliamentary elections, it is difficult to predict what will happen in the next months. Serebryak may try focus her presidency for a while on foreign policy, paradoxically as she campaigned mostly on domestic issues, denouncing Bogdan Privsek's government economic policies.

"Today, Mordvania has turned a successful page of our history", she declared in a speech to her supporters in Slovograd. "We are going to start a new and even more succesful, but this won't be achieved without unity and strength. Serebryak promised that she would guarantee the "unity of the nation and the defend the values for which our republic was founded" and that "nobody will be left behind anymore". Tomorrow, she is expected to meet the Chairman of the Council of Defense Bozidar Strnad.