LONDON — The rhetoric before the Serbian parliamentary election May 11 was ugly enough, but it has gotten worse since. President Boris Tadic spun the outcome as a victory for the pro-European Union forces when only half the votes were counted, which served his purposes as he is also the leader of the main pro-EU party, the Democratic Party.
But when all the votes were counted it turned out that 48 percent of Serbs had voted anti-EU, and only 44 percent pro-EU. (The rest voted for various small ethnic-minority parties.)
This doesn't mean that the anti-EU, pro-Moscow forces will actually form the next government, because 30 parties ran in the elections and many different coalitions are theoretically possible.