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Serbia's nationalist parties are softening their anti-European Union stance for the sake of a coalition deal with the kingmaker Socialist Party, which could be signed soon, officials said on Thursday. An inconclusive May 11 election left Serbia split between hardliners led by the Radical Party of Tomislav Nikolic and liberals led by the Democratic Party of President Boris Tadic. The Socialists of late autocrat Slobodan Milosevic hold the key to any coalition. The party, which insists on closer ties with the EU, has been negotiating a coalition with the Radicals and the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) for almost three...

BELGRADE, Serbia - The head of an ultranationalist party leading the polls going into Serbia's elections doesn't like to be compared to Slobodan Milosevic. He says the late leader wasn't hard enough during the Balkan wars and paved the way for losing Kosovo. "Milosevic was a communist, then a socialist, but he was never a nationalist," Tomislav Nikolic, the leader of Serbia's far-right Radicals, said during an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press. Two years after Milosevic died while on trial by a U.N. tribunal on genocide charges tied to the bloody breakup of former Yugoslavia, Nikolic's party could use...

Excerpt - BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbia's ultranationalist Radical Party claimed victory in national elections on Sunday, in a voter rejection of Western appeals for closer cooperation on the arrest of war criminals and on Kosovo. A projection of the result showed the opposition Radicals, strongest party in Serbia for years, taking 28 percent of the vote, a point higher than the 2003 national elections. "The Radical Party has won these elections," said Tomislav Nikolic, the Radical's candidate for prime minister in the absence of party leader Vojislav Seselj, who is on trial for war crimes at the U.N. tribunal in...