Serbia: elections -- again

Sunday's parliamentary elections are being represented as Serbia's choice between pro- and anti-Westernism.  The electorate will speak -- indecisively, as before.  After the last parliamentary elections in January 2007, it took until May to form an administration, and it proved highly unstable.

In the polls, the Democrat-G17 Plus coalition and the anti-EU Radicals have about one-third of the vote each, the Radicals usually a point or two ahead.  Three smaller parties may also enter parliament, with a coalition likely to be formed of one major and two minor parties.  It may all turn, as before, on outgoing Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, whose Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) is polling at about 11-14%.

In a bitter election campaign, Kostunica has condemned his erstwhile Democrat coalition allies as 'traitors' for signing the Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU, after many EU states recognised Kosovo as independent of Serbia.  Democrat President Boris Tadic has received letters accusing him of betraying Serbia and threatening him with a bullet in the brain, just as former Democrat Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was assassinated in March 2003.

Bad blood may make it difficult for Kostunica and the Democrats to get back together.  Seemingly unbridgeable gulfs lie between them on policy, and it is a formula that has failed.  The Radicals have called on Kostunica to commit himself before the elections to forming a coalition with them, but he will not answer.  They may not be as ready as the Democrats to let him be premier, and it would be an uncomfortable alliance between his bourgeois nationalists and an extremist anti-system party supported by those who have lost out in the economic reforms Kostunica has supported since 2000.  The DSS, the 'respectable' face of nationalism, do not impress the Radicals, and apart from Kosovo, much divides them.