Yugoslavia's parliament passed new election laws yesterday which President Slobodan Milosevic's opponents say are designed to help keep him in power.
The laws, intended to implement in detail controversial constitutional changes pushed through earlier this month, were overwhelmingly adopted by both houses of the Serbian-dominated federal assembly.
The extraordinary session of parliament took place amid opposition speculation that the ruling coalition may schedule elections for September.
The leader of the Serbian Radical Party, Mr Vojislav Seselj, said the elections would be held across Yugoslavia, including Kosovo, "even though that part of the country was under occupation". He said that ethnic Albanians were welcome to vote.
If the vote could not be organised in Kosovo, now under de facto international control, balloting would be held in the nearby municipalities of Vranje and Prokuplje, southern Serbia.
Parliamentary and local elections should be held by early November and some analysts believe Mr Milosevic may go for an early presidential vote at the same time. Independent analysts say the ruling coalition of socialists, neo-communists and ultranationalists is in a hurry to have all elections soon because of financial problems.
"They cannot afford another bout of hyper-inflation, but they cannot keep on controlling finances for much longer," said an independent economist.
European leaders at the G8 summit said on Saturday the international community should not recognise any election results based on the new laws. Some Serbian opposition leaders and ruling parties in Montenegro understood this as a boycott call.
Recent opinion polls in Serbia and Montenegro suggested that Mr Milosevic remained the most trusted politician in the country but that a united opposition would defeat his ruling coalition.
The Montenegrin Justice Minister, Mr Dragan Soc, said the republic, Serbia's smaller partner, would not accept any laws resulting from recently adopted amendments to the Yugoslav constitution.
In Serbia, opposition parties said they were facing a hard choice - to take part and give legitimacy to Mr Milosevic, who is indicted by The Hague war crimes tribunal, or boycott and let the Serbian strongman rule for eight more years.
Some argue that a boycott would only hand Mr Milosevic an easy victory. "If the Serbian opposition wins a majority and loses out because of a Montenegrin boycott, the whole world would see them as Milosevic's saviours," Mr Zoran Djindjic of the Democratic Party told the daily Blic.