EU welcomes Tadic re-election
Serbia’s pro-West president beats nationalist rival in closely contested vote.
Tadic has called for closer ties with the EU while Nikolic advocated turning to Russia instead of the West, which backs Kosovo’s majority Albanians in their quest for independence.
“We want to go to Europe. We want to co-operate with the world,” Tadic said at a victory rally.
“This is Serbia’s victory. I think we have proven both to Europe and everywhere else in the world what kind of democracy we have in Serbia.”
Supporters celebrate
On Sunday, the election commission said Tadic had won a projected 50.5 per cent of the vote to Nikolic’s 47.9 per cent.Final results are expected in the early hours of the morning.
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Tadic supporters poured on to the streets of Belgrade, the capital, to celebrate, sounding car horns and waving the blue and yellow flags of the Democratic party.
Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips in Belgrade said that the mood among Tadic’s supporters was one of relief.
“Their man sneaked home but the size of the opposition vote shows that many Serbs are unhappy with the way their country is being led,” he said.
“Tadic won, my congratulations,” Nikolic told his supporters. “I would like to call on everyone to stay calm.”
“We will be a strong opposition both to the authorities and the president,” he told his Radical Party supporters.
The issue of Kosovo had weighed heavily in the elections, although both men had opposed ethnic Albanians’ independence drive.
In his victory speech, Tadic restated his commitment to Serbs living in majority ethnic Albanian Kosovo.
“We give support today to our fellow people in Kosovo and show them that we will never let them down” Boris Tadic, Serbia’s president |
“We give support today to our fellow people in Kosovo and show them that we will never let them down,” he said.
Kostunica wants a harder response to Kosovo independence, including diplomatic sanctions against the West, repudiation of the EU and measures to strangle the province economically.
Tadic’s Democratic Party “will threaten early parliamentary elections and Kostunica will threaten to form a government with [Nikolic’s] Radicals”, Djordje Vukadinovic, a Serbian political analyst, said.