The pollsters on Monday said that President Filip Vujanovic won re-election by a landslide, cementing Montenegro’s westward economic and political course since breaking away from Serbia two years ago.
According to election monitors, Vujanovic defeated all major challengers in the Sunday’s presidential vote. The president won 51.4 percent of the vote, easily beating pro-Serbia’s Andrija Mandic’s with 20.4 percent and Liberal candidate Nebojsa Medojevic’s 15.7 percent of the vote.

The election observers reported that final results were not available until Tuesday. The independent Center for Monitoring cited a final vote count at polling stations by its own monitors. Turnout was 69 percent, about 22 percentage points higher than in 2003, when Vujanovic, 53, won his first five-year term.

Vujanovic’s supporters celebrated his win by putting huge show fireworks, honking car horns, and waving Montenegro’s crimson-colored national flags after the results were announced over state television.

The leader of the ruling Democratic Party of Socialists — and, one of the staunchest advocates of Montenegro’s split from Serbia — President Vujanovic, said his victory Sunday shows that “a majority of Montenegrins support our policies.” Addressing the cheering supporters, Vujanovic said, “I won for Montenegro and its future. I will be the president of all the people in Montenegro.”

“Vujanovic’s victory shows we are leading the right policies,” said the Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, who wields the real power in Montenegro, where the Socialists have ruled virtually unchallenged for nearly two decades.

Independent kingdom before World War I, Montenegro became part of Yugoslavia until that federation disintegrated in warfare in the early 1990s. It remained joined with Serbia until seceding peacefully in May 2006. The relations between the two nations since have been chilly. But, Montenegro’s economy has flourished since breaking away from Serbia, with annual economic growth of 8 percent and some $1.6 billion in foreign investment. However, Montenegro’s ethnic Serbs — who make up about 30 percent of the population of 620,000 — opposed the split from Belgrade.