Serbia's pro-Western president declares victory in elections

Tadic, who opposes Kosovo's independence and reiterated Sunday that he would never recognize its statehood, claimed last week that he had received death threats.

He also has been publicly denounced as a traitor for signing a pre-entry aid and trade pact with the EU -a deal that Kostunica and Nikolic contend amounts to blood money in exchange for giving up Kosovo.

Yet many Serbs responded to Tadic's message that the country's future lies with the EU.

"I voted for Europe and against the road that leads us back to the misery of the 1990s," Milica Ostojic, a 22-year-old university student, said Sunday after casting her ballot at a packed polling station in Belgrade.

Milosevic was ousted by a pro-democracy movement in 2000, and the former leader -who presided over the bloody 1990s breakup of Yugoslavia -died in March 2006 in a prison cell in The Hague, Netherlands, where a U.N. tribunal was trying him for atrocities in the Balkans.

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Associated Press writers Dusan Stojanovic and Jovana Gec contributed to this report.