Turnout may decide knife-edge Serbian election

By Ellie Tzortzi

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbia votes on Sunday in a knife-edge presidential election that could decide whether it turns its back on the West in response to the imminent loss of the breakaway province of Kosovo.

The race between pro-Western president Boris Tadic and nationalist challenger Tomislav Nikolic is too close to call, analysts said.

Tadic will hope for a high turnout to counter the dedicated supporters of Nikolic, who beat him by 40 per cent to 35.4 in the first round two weeks ago when just over 60 percent of the 6.7 million voters turned out.

Both men oppose Kosovo's independence drive. Nikolic wants Serbia to turn to Russia to punish the West for backing Kosovo's majority Albanians. Tadic is asking Serbs to swallow their pride and pursue European Union membership whatever happens.

Polls open at 7 a.m. (6:00 a.m. British time) and close at 8 p.m. (7:00 p.m. British time). First projections of the outcome are expected an hour later at the earliest. Monitoring groups say they will be very cautious about calling the result.

Nikolic's Radical Party has consistently taken a third of the vote in all elections since the fall of autocrat Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. It is tapping into anger over Kosovo, painful economic transition and widespread corruption.

"Serbia wants a change, it wants to control the authorities," he said in a televised duel this week.

He advocates closer ties with Moscow, Serbia's only big power ally on the issue of Kosovo, and says "Serbia has two roads: the one to Russia is wide open, the other one to the EU is thorny and full of obstacles".