Serbia's Stark Choice: Cabinet Dissolves Coalition, Calls for Elections (original) (raw)

The Serbian coalition government was formally dissolved on Monday, opening the way for snap elections and offering Serbs a stark choice between closer ties with Europe or international isolation.

The decision to dissolve the government was taken by the cabinet on Monday following Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica's announcement on Saturday that the coalition had failed to overcome itsdisunity over whether to link the issues of Kosovo and EU membership. "The government did not have a united and common policy any more," a government statement said on Monday, "and this kept it from performing its basic constitutional function, to define and lead Serbia's politics."

Kostunica pulled the plug on the shaky coalition of pro-Western and nationalist parties after the Democrats and G17 Plus party voted down a resolution that would have blocked Serbia's path to the European Union as long as it backed Kosovo's independence. Not all of the bloc's 27 members have recognized the breakaway state but Brussels is deploying a mission that will monitor the territory's progress.

The cabinet called on President Boris Tadic to officially disband parliament and call new elections, most likely for May 11. The vote will be a close race between the Democrats and the nationalist Radicals, currently the biggest party in parliament. The Serbs could well be facing a repeat of the political limbo the country suffered last year, when it took the parties five months to hammer out a coalition agreement. This time, though, it is possible that the Radicals could team up with Kostunica's small conservative party to create a more nationalist coalition.

The government looked increasingly likely to collapse over the Kosovo issue after Kostunica failed to back Tadic, also head of the Democrats, in the presidential election in February. A majority of Serbs used to back the pro-Western Tadic against his ultranationalist rival, but that was beforeKosovo declared independence .

The pro-European Tadic shares the nationalists' rejection of Kosovo's independence but has refused to link the issue to that of Serbia's future within the EU. On Sunday he said that attempts to divide the Serbs into patriots and traitors over Kosovo would backfire at the polls. "If we join the EU, then we can make sure that this outlaw state never becomes an EU member," he said on a TV talk show.

Kosovo, which is 90 percent ethnic Albanian, had been under UN administration since 1999 when a NATO bombing campaign halted former Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic's brutal crackdown on Kosovo Albanian separatists. Kosovo declared independence on Feb. 17, but Serbia dismissed the move as illegal under international law. Belgrade is now instructing Kosovo's remaining 120,000 Serbs not to cooperate with the new government in Pristina.

EU officials are openly backing the pro-Western President Boris Tadic and his Democrats. Speaking in Brussels on Monday, the EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said he hoped Serbs would "continue pushing for a relationship, deep and solid, with the European Union."

Slovenian Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel, whose country holds the rotating presidency, said he hoped the pro-Europe parties would prevail. "To be quite frank, I don’t think there is any other possibility for our Serbian friends than the European Union. Where should they go?" he said on Monday. Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who was UN special envoy to the Balkans in 1999-2001, said he hoped the elections would provide "an opportunity for Serbia to choose a European cause more firmly than before."

Meanwhile on Sunday Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci claimed that his nascent state had actually contributed to democracy in Serbia. "In 1999, when we pushed the police, army and administration out of Kosovo, Milosevic's fall from power started," he said. "Now with Kosovo's independence, Kostunica has fallen, the mentality of the past has fallen in Serbia."