Pro-EU party leads polls in knife-edge Serbia election
Pro-EU reformists are nosing ahead in the latest polls before Serbia's elections on Sunday (21 January) - a pivotal event that could raise prospects of Serbia EU entry and Kosovo independence, or aggravate the risk of renewed ethnic conflict in the heart of modern Europe.
The pro-EU Democratic Party of president Boris Tadic scored 29 percent in a CESID poll on Thursday as campaigning ended ahead of the vote, with prime minister Vojislav Kostunica's Democratic Party of Serbia on 19 percent and the nationalist Serbian Radical Party of war crimes indictee Vojislav Seselj on 26 percent, Balkans agency DTT-NET.COM reports.
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The EU's preferred scenario would see Tadic and Kostunica team up with one of the 17 smaller parties, such as the pro-EU G17 Plus faction, to snatch over 50 percent of Belgrade's 250-seat parliament and gradually steer the country toward compliance with the UN war crimes tribunal and a negotiated settlement on Kosovo.
Its worst case scenario could see Kostunica unite with the radicals to block Kosovo independence and the UN war crimes purge, wrecking what's left of Serbia's EU entry talks and provoking Pristina into a unilateral grab at independence that pits ethnic Serbs against ethnic Albanians in a throwback to the bloody 1990s.
About 6.7 million people have registered to vote for 3,795 individual candidates at the country's 8,400 polling stations, with most ballots opening at 07:00 local time and closing at 20:00 on Sunday and with EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday and Tuesday to digest results.
Brussels, Washington and the UN have done what they can to give Mr Tadic a boost coming into the poll: putting off the UN's Kosovo status proposal until after the elections, granting membership in a prestigious NATO scheme last month and even dangling suggestions that EU entry talks could resume before war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic is caught.
"I hope very much [the vote] will produce a government that is pro-European, that supports the values we promote," EU top diplomat Javier Solana said Wednesday in a sign of all-but-open support for Tadic. "A...pro-European government in Belgrade could make rapid progress toward the EU," enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn said the same day.
The more blunt US diplomat Dan Fried said on Thursday "nationalism in that part of the world is like cheap alcohol. First it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, then it kills you."
"[Yugoslavia] didn't die of natural causes; it was murdered by Milosevic...I'm sorry that happened, but the fact is it's done and we must move on."
Kosovo dominates election
Kosovo has dominated campaigning inside Serbia with Mr Tadic saying he will push to keep the province but "in a European, diplomatic way" while playing up Serbia's EU-related economic recovery since 2004. But Mr Kostunica has plumped for nationalist slogans such as "Long Live Serbia" or "Serbia is too small to be divided."
At street level, news agencies report mixed emotions: "I just wish we could finally move on and be a normal country again...not just better jobs and lower taxes, but a sense of direction, some certainty where we're heading," Dubravka Jelisic, a Belgrade school teacher told AP.
"We don't want a new war here. We want peace and higher standards of living. But we will never agree to an imposed solution over Kosovo," Svetislav Stojmenovic, a restaurateur in Bujanovac, told the BBC.
Whatever happens on Sunday, the real test for new Serbia and the international community will come one or two weeks later when UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari unveils his proposal for a future UN security council resolution on the final status of Kosovo.
Provisional independence on offer
Diplomatic leaks indicate Mr Ahtisaari will offer "provisional independence" with full sovereignty on hold until Pristina meets human rights standards and agrees on decentralised rule with ethnic-Serb enclaves, while an EU envoy and armed EU police force take over power from the UN and NATO during the interim.
The Ahtisaari plan will catapult the Kosovo question onto the geo-political stage, with UN veto power Russia firmly opposed to Kosovo independence and with some EU states such as Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia also sympathetic to keeping Serbia intact.
"The election in Serbia is about Europe and the future," Kosovo's ethnic Albanian prime minister and ex-guerrilla fighter Agim Ceku said in the International Herald Tribune on Thursday. "Kosovo's final status will ensure that we seize this historic opportunity, pronounce Kosovo independent and begin a genuine regional push toward the EU."