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Ex-communist Milan Kucan won a second five-year term Sunday as president of the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia, provisional official results showed.
With 99.6 percent of votes counted, the 56-year-old lawyer, who ran as an independent, had won 55.6 percent. This was down from his 64 percent showing in the last election in 1992 but well ahead of his nearest rival, parliamentary speaker Janez Podobnik.
Podobnik, of the conservative People’s Party, won 18.4 percent. Only two of the six other candidates scored more than 5 percent.
The result was widely seen as a reward for Kucan’s handling of Slovenia’s comparatively peaceful breakaway from communist Yugoslavia in 1991 and its subsequent transition to becoming a free-market democracy.
