Elections highlight Serbia's uncertain future

BELGRADE, Serbia (CNN) -- Ljuban Panic, a 23-year-old business studies student from Novi Sad, Serbia's second city, has walked 80 kilometers through the Fruska Gora mountains to attend the Democratic Party's final rally in Belgrade ahead of Sunday's crucial parliamentary elections.

"There were 84 of us. We walked through the night and we are tired," said Panic. "But we marched so that when people go to vote they will remember us, the young people. We have the energy and the will to carry Serbia into the European Union. It is a process that cannot be stopped."

Not everyone in Serbia agrees. A little more than 12 months since the last parliamentary elections, the country is going to the polls again after the fragile ruling coalition between President Boris Tadic's pro-Western Democrats and the similarly titled Democratic Party of Serbia, led by the nationalist prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, collapsed into irreparable acrimony following the declaration of independence by Kosovo and its subsequence recognition by the U.S. and leading EU states.

For many Serbs, the idea of forging closer links with Western powers duplicitous in Kosovo's breakaway amounts to treachery. Both Kostunica and Tomislav Nikolic, the hardline leader of the powerful ultra-nationalist Radical Party, say there can be no accommodation with the West while Kosovo's status as a Serbian province remains in question and threaten to align their country with Russia if elected.

Tadic also states that Kosovo belongs to Serbia but says he is not prepared to make that a condition of Serbia continuing on the path towards European Union accession. That stance has seen Tadic labelled a "traitor" by nationalists.

When his government signed a pre-membership agreement last week in an initiative to bolster pro-EU feeling ahead of Sunday's vote, the president said he had received death threats, accusing him of "betraying the Serb people." Freshly painted graffiti on Belgrade walls reads: "Tadic Judas."

Strangely, while the election has been widely described as the most important in Serbia's recent democratic history, voters on Sunday will likely be audience participants rather than principal players in determining the shape of the next government.

With polls showing Tadic's Democratic Party and Nikolic's Radicals both on course to win upwards of 30 percent of the vote, and Kostunica's Democratic Party of Serbia winning around 13 percent, no single party is expected to come close to securing an overall mandate.

Yet there is confidence among supporters of the Radical Party that common cause with Kostunica over Kosovo could be the key to forging an alliance that would bring them into government for the first time since the end of the Slobodan Milosevic era in 2000.

"People are cynical. They don't believe the politicians anymore and they really want change," Ivan Sasic, a 19-year-old Radical Party member, told CNN during a rally in Belgrade.

"When I look at Tomislav Nikolic I see an honest man. When I see Boris Tadic, I like what he is saying but it is just marketing. It's like he is on some talk show. We say, let's give the Radicals a chance. How bad can it be?"

For others however, the prospect of a Radical-led government would be a worrying step back towards Serbia's troubled recent past as an international pariah state. The Radicals' party president, Vojislav Seselj, is a former political ally of Milosevic who is currently facing war crimes charges at the Hague. Yet Nikolic, who himself served in Milosevic's administration during the 1999 war between NATO and Serbia, said Wednesday that Sesilj could join a new government if he is allowed to return when his trial ends later this year.

"They want people to think that they are a completely new opposition, that they have never been in power but that is not true," Igor Bozic, deputy director of the broadcasting network B92, told CNN. "They were in government with Milosevic and a lot of people have not forgotten that."

Whatever the result of Sunday's vote, however, many analysts predict months of wrangling before a coalition government emerges. In a country skewered between withdrawal from the West over Kosovo and greater engagement with the wealth and benefits of the European Union, a longer lasting solution to Serbia's political crisis may be even more elusive.

"Whether it is a nationalist coalition or a pro-Western coalition, it is going to be a troubled coalition," journalist Dejan Anastasijevic told CNN. "It will have a tiny majority in parliament, it will have the other side breathing down its neck and there will be infighting within the coalition."

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