Serbia's Choice: Nationalism or the Path to Brussels?

The Serbian people go to the polls this Sunday to elect a new president. Opinion polls predict that current Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica and Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Miroljub Labus will be the top two vote-getters in this first-round voting. Kostunica is expected to win in the second head-to-head runoff to be held two weeks later.

The result of the election will have far-reaching consequences for continued economic and geo-political reforms taking place in Serbia. The current Yugoslav Federation, of which Serbia is a part, is set to metamorphasise into a looser union, specified simply as Montenegro and Serbia.

The post of Serbian President will provide Kostunica – whose opponents describe as the respectable face of hardline Serbian nationalists – with the best chance of hanging on to power in the Balkan region. Serbia is the largest state in the former Yugoslavia.

Power Struggle

Observers in the former Yugloslavian state fear that victory for Kostunica will result in an internal power stuggle between the Serbian prime minister and the Serbian president. Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic is backing Labus.

Labus is a pro-market liberal and has been praised by western officials for introducing free-market reforms (together with Djindjic) in Serbia.

Kostunica -- a 58-year-old law professor of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) -- describes himself as a moderate nationalist and argues that these reforms have been carried out badly and could cause future problems for the Serbian economy.

Kostunica has said that establishing the democratic rule of law will be his top priority if he wins on Sunday. He also wants to oversee the creation of a new constitution and other laws to replace legislation dating from the authoritarian rule of Slobodon Milosevic.

“Mr. Labus is fond of saying the economy is above everything. For me, law is above everything…those are very serious and very principled differences between us,” he told Reuters news agency in an interview earlier this week.

Kostunica has also fiercely criticised the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal, where Milosevic is currently on trial. Kostunica accuses the tribunal of having an anti-Serb bias. He also caused outrage in ex-Yugoslav Bosnia when he declared at a campaign rally that Serbia and Bosnia were only “temporarily separated”.

The election campaign has been marred by growing racial tension in the state. United Nations police stopped ultra-nationalist leader Vorjisla Seselj from entering Kosovo on Thursday fearing his appearance at an election rally would stoke ethnic tensions.

UN officials have discouraged Serbian politicians from campaigning in the province, fearing outrage from the ethnic Albanian majority who want complete independence for the region, placed under UN control in 1999.

The current Serbian President, Milan Milutinovic, has already been indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, and could be at risk of extradition once out of office at the end of the year. Meanwhile on Friday at the Hague War Crimes Tribunal, Milosevic faced the first prosecution witnesses on Croatia and Bosnia – the weightest section of the case against him.