SERBIA:Two parties with opposing visions for their country are battling it out for next month's polls, writes Daniel McLaughlin
A month before Serbia goes to the polls, pro-western liberals appear to be gaining on the ultra-nationalist radicals in a race for power between parties with starkly different visions of the nation's future. Recent surveys suggest the Democrats of President Boris Tadic are now only a whisker behind the Radicals as Serbia's most popular party, and should be able to cobble together a working coalition of like-minded groups with a parliamentary majority and a collective will to guide the country towards the European Union and Nato.
But they face fierce competition from the Radicals, who are likely to be the biggest single force in the next parliament, and who vow never to join Nato, to only enter the EU on ideal terms for Serbia, and to fight tooth and nail to keep Kosovo.
The United Nations pledged to resolve Kosovo's status this year but, aware that granting independence to the overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian region would anger Serbs and strengthen the nationalists' election hand, it has postponed the ruling until after the polls.
The West has also boosted Mr Tadic this month by welcoming Serbia into Nato's Partnership for Peace programme and by using an EU summit to tell Belgrade that it was ready to open talks on eventual accession once the elections were over and fugitive war criminals were caught.
The opinion polls suggest Serbs welcome this gentle thaw in relations with the West, after enduring years of violence and isolation under Slobodan Milosevic that made the relative prosperity of life in pre-war Yugoslavia a very dim and distant memory.
President Tadic promises to catch Gen Ratko Mladic, the UN war crimes court's most wanted, and to push quickly for a place in the EU and Nato; he also tells Serbs to accept the painful truth that there is little they can do to stop the West granting some form of independence to Kosovo.
The Radicals, and their Socialist partners in ultra-nationalism, sing a different tune.
Radical leader Vojislav Seselj, who is on trial for war crimes at The Hague, says Serbia should "cut off relations forever" with any country that recognises a sovereign Kosovo, and he still clings to his wartime dream of a "Greater Serbia" incorporating Serb-populated areas in Bosnia and Croatia.
For his part Ivica Dacic, who was named this month as leader of the Socialist Party formerly run by Milosevic, says: "Kosovo is Serbia's birthplace and no one has the right to say that we will not go to war for Kosovo."
At the head of a fractious government, current prime minister Vojislav Kostunica has had to rely on the Socialists to give him a parliamentary majority, and he treads a fine and sometimes convoluted line between President Tadic and the ultra-nationalists.
Less openly pro-western than Mr Tadic, and less publicly realistic about the impending decision on Kosovo, he seems keen to be an "acceptable face of nationalism".
His party is likely to come third in the election, with polls currently giving him around 18 per cent against 26 per cent for Mr Tadic's allies and about 28 per cent for the Radicals.
The pragmatic Mr Tadic is likely to find coalition partners among smaller parties that also favour integration with the EU and Nato, a path that he says is the only realistic way of bringing investment to Serbia and boosting its parlous economy.
The ultra-nationalists prefer to look back, harping on Serbia's long history of glorious defeats and blaming Washington and the EU for the country's current woes, while favouring alliances with the likes of Russia, China and Arab states.