Serbia's election concern to some

See no guarantees of tilt toward West

Boris Tadic, Serbia's president, spoke to his supporters in Belgrade after winning the presidential election on Sunday. Tadic won a narrow reelection victory over a nationalist challenger. (oliver bunic/bloomberg news)

BELGRADE - President Boris Tadic's reelection could help Serbia turn toward the West but analysts said the narrow margin of his victory still threatened to collapse the fragile governing coalition, feed nationalist sentiment, and push Belgrade to a harder line over its breakaway province, Kosovo.

Tadic's 50.5 percent of the vote, compared with 47.7 percent for Tomislav Nikolic, the nationalist Radical Party challenger, amounted to a difference of about 128,000 votes and spotlighted the rift in Serbia between those who want to move toward the European Union and those who want to move closer to Russia and China.

The victory by Tadic, an advocate of closer ties with the United States and Europe, has mollified concerns that Serbia could react violently to the expected independence of Kosovo.

Tadic's Democratic Party controls the army and has ruled out military action.

Tadic pledged yesterday that he would continue to take Serbia on a Western course.

"This is Serbia, which is going straight to the European Union," he told thousands of jubilant supporters who were waving Serbian and EU flags in central Belgrade.

The coalition government's first big test will come Thursday, when Deputy Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic, a close ally of Tadic's and a member of his Democratic Party, will defy Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica and sign a new agreement with the European Union in Brussels that would ease visa restrictions on Serbia, cement economic ties, and help clear the way to future EU membership.

"Our EU future and Kosovo are two issues that should not be linked," Djelic said in an interview yesterday. "I can't imagine that any party or politician will try and block us from signing an agreement because that would go against the will of the people" expressed in the election.

He added that the government was determined to gain EU candidate status for Serbia by the end of the year.

Kostunica - a constitutional lawyer and one of the leaders of the revolution that deposed President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 - is determined to hold on to Kosovo and he refused to endorse Tadic during the election campaign because of the president's willingness to embrace the EU, even if it backs Kosovo's independence.

Nikolic, meanwhile, is considered a political heir of Milosevic.

People close to Kostunica said he was desperate not to go down in history as the Serbian leader who lost Kosovo.

He is so driven by that fear, they said, that he could decide to make the governing coalition unmanageable, force it to dissolve and form a new majority with the Radical Party and even his former archrivals, Milosevic's Socialists.

"Kostunica has his eyes on the history books and his legacy and he wants to hold on to Kosovo at all costs, even if that means putting the government in crisis," said Milan Mikolic, director of the Center for Policy Studies here. "He is not behaving as a rational politician."

Even if the coalition remained intact, Tadic's power as a moderating force is circumscribed because the presidency in Serbia is a largely symbolic office. Kostunica is a key driver of government policy and can block the adoption of laws.

Still, Tadic's Democratic Party holds the balance of power in the coalition, including the foreign and defense ministries, and Kostunica has been significantly weakened by the president's re-election.