Two Serbias fight for nation's soul in key election

BELGRADE, Jan 20 (Reuters) The glittering Zara flagship store is a must stop for the slim, fashionable girls walking with purpose up Knez Mihailova, Belgrade's main shopping concourse.

They lift their designer sunglasses, peer and enter. Members of Serbia's emerging middle class, they have little in common with the middle-aged women jostling around nearby street stalls to buy five pairs of polyester socks for one euro.

The foreign shops came after reformers ousted late autocrat Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. The wooden stalls were a feature through the 1990s, when Serbia was an outcast punished with sanctions for wars Milosevic instigated as Yugoslavia fell apart.

The division they represent is unlikely to go away soon regardless of politicians' promises ahead of tomorrow's general election, which is expected to be a close race between the ultranationalist Radicals and the pro-Western Democratic Party.

''The losers of the transition will mainly vote for the Radical Party,'' says pollster Marko Blagojevic.

''Those who live better, or think they'll live better in the near future thanks to reforms, will likely vote for parties of the 'democratic bloc'.'' The transition losers are people like Milan Velebit, a 52-year old worker in a state-owned printing firm. His monthly salary of 250 euros is the only income for his family of four, who live in a small house he built with no permission.

He votes Radical because ''everything in Serbia is in chaos''.

''The economy is in chaos, the state is not doing its job,'' he says. ''They are not taking care of the workers, the peasants.

Companies are privatised and people are left on the street.'' ''NATIONAL PRIDE'' Velebit brings out for his guests the expensive rakija brandy kept for special occasions. In his kitchen, decorated with icons and old-fashioned ornaments, he speaks of a childhood in rural Croatia, and of the humiliations Serbia has suffered.

''The Radicals are fighting for our state, our people,'' he says. ''We must have national pride so the world respects us''.

He hopes the Radicals will manage to keep Kosovo, the breakaway province run by the United Nations since a 1999 NATO bombing drove out Serb forces accused of atrocities while fighting an ethnic Albanian insurgency.

He doesn't think much of the ''Euro-Atlantic integration'' promised by pro-Western parties as a shortcut to prosperity.

''We've been pushed back by NATO and destroyed with bombing, I don't see how they can help us,'' he said.

''We were ahead of Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania. Now they're all in the European Union, and who knows if we'll ever join...'' Serbia's bid to eventually join the EU was frozen by Brussels in May, over Belgrade's failure to arrest Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic a man the Radicals revere.

The Democrats' slogan, 'Life cannot wait', is meant as a reminder and an appeal to voters like Danica Vujicic, a 34-year old advertising executive who says the 1990s were ''a nightmare''.

''I want a stable economy and a stable country,'' she says in her brightly-coloured office that could be in Paris or New York.

''I want to know my job can develop, that my son has a future.'' Vujicic will vote for the Democratic Party because they are ''closest to European values and can take Serbia to the EU''. She hates feeling like a second-class citizen, queuing for visas when she wants to travel, and is tired of nationalist paranoia.

''The 1990s made us close up and be scared of things that come from outside,'' she says. ''We must become more open.'' For this young, working mother, the campaign of the Radicals is simply dragging up a past that is best laid to rest.

''That closing of the country, all that nationalism, it's all very dark, it frightens me,'' Vujicic says, her hands tightly clasped on the lap of her pastel suit.

''If the Radicals came to power, my family and I would leave, maybe join my sister who emigrated to the United States in the 1990s. I would not want to raise my child here.'' Reuters SY KP1001