Serb president due to call early election

BELGRADE, Nov 10 (Reuters) Serbian President Boris Tadic was expected to formally call an early parliamentary election today, with the date possibly influencing the timing of a decision on the fate of Serbia's breakaway Kosovo province.

Several senior political sources said yesterday that Jan. 21 was the election date agreed on by most parties. A consensus was necessary for the adoption in parliament of a relevant law.

An announcement was expected in the morning, shortly before the Contact Group guiding Balkan diplomacy -- the US Britain, Italy, France, Germany and Russia -- meet in Vienna to consider the next move on Kosovo.

The West, which intervened in 1999 to stop the killing of civilians by Serb forces, is widely sympathetic to the ethnic Albanian majority's demand for independence.

The big powers had hinted earlier they would wait until after Serbian elections, if held in December, to avoid driving voters into the arms of the ultranationalist Radical Party, Serbia's strongest.

The election will pit the Radicals against the pro-Western Democratic Party led by Tadic, second in polls.

Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica's Democratic Party of Serbia and its smaller allies in the minority government lag in the preferences of voters disappointed at what the see as failure to deliver on many promises.

The vote had been on the cards since October. 29 when Serbia voted to replace the 1990 constitution written under the rule of late President Slobodan Milosevic.

Parties wrangled for days over the exact date, delaying the adoption of a new constitutional law that would define a timetable for the election. They approved the law today in the early hours.

REUTERS BDP PM1406