Kucan Wins Second Term as President

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