Serbians Losing Fervor for European Union Ascension PETROVAC NA MLAVI, Serbia - Looking eerily like the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, a stout and stern-faced Ivica Dacic roused supporters crowded in a sports arena here this past week, promising to protect Serbs from the ravages of capitalism and warning that violence against Serbs in Kosovo was tantamount to an assault on Belgrade. "This may be a small town but the red color lives on here," Mr. Dacic, the leader of the Socialist Party, said Wednesday, alluding to the town's proud working-class roots. We speak Serbian so the whole world can understand you. The audience of teens, retirees and coal miners roared approvingly. A loudspeaker blared the nationalist lyrics: "All you heroes, get ready for battle!" As Serbs prepare to vote in presidential and parliamentary elections here Sunday, the charismatic Mr. Dacic, 46, who croons Frank Sinatra tunes and has invoked Barack Obama, Vladimir V. Putin and former President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia as his role models, has gained wide support by mixing patriotism, pragmatism and an appeal to social justice. In response to visceral public anger against the country's crony politics, he has cannily upgraded Mr. Milosevic's former slogan, "No one is allowed to beat you" to "No one is allowed to lie to you." Mr. Dacic, a tough-talking interior minister in the current coalition government of the country's pro-Western president, Boris Tadic, is expected to be kingmaker in elections Sunday, and a possible next prime minister. Neither of the top two leading parties, Mr. Tadic's Democrats or the Progressive Party of Tomislav Nikolic, a former ultranationalist funeral parlor chief who has refashioned himself as pro-European, will likely be able to form a government without him. The latest polls show them neck-in-neck in the presidential race, which is expected to go to a run-off on May 20. Mr. Dacic's soaring popularity, analysts say, reflects widespread disenchantment with the current government of Mr. Tadic, a George Clooney look-a-like and darling of Brussels and Washington who has successfully shepherded the country toward the European Union during his eight years as president. Nevertheless, he has come under intensifying criticism at home for Serbia's weak economy, 24 percent unemployment rate, accusations of corruption and patronage, and an authoritarian stranglehold over the media the likes of which critics say the country has not experienced since Mr. Milosevic's times. Mr. Dacic, a former spokesman for Mr. Milosevic, has sought to transform his former mentor's party into a mainstream social democratic party, firmly abandoning its old warmongering ideology, if not its old appeals to Serbian pride. He insisted in an interview that he was not the reincarnation of the former ruler. "We can never return to that era," he said. As evidence, he advocated Serbia's E.U. membership and strong relations with the United States. But he also warned that Serbia could turn toward Russia if the bloc insisted that Belgrade recognize Kosovo as a condition of joining. In another salvo unlikely to be greeted warmly in Brussels or Washington, he suggested that partitioning Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, could be a solution for solving divisions there. NATO said Friday that its peacekeeping force would seek to maintain the uneasy peace in the Serb-dominated North of Kosovo, where Serbs, who do not recognize Kosovo's authority, plan to vote. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has agreed to oversee parliamentary and presidential elections in Kosovo but not local elections, which some Serbs have vowed to hold and which Kosovo has warned it will use force to curtail. The elections come at a seminal moment for Serbia. Thirteen years after NATO bombed Belgrade to halt the killing of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the poor Balkan country was invited to become a candidate for E.U. membership in March. The move marked a final end to more than two decades as a pariah nation following the bloody break-up of the former Yugoslavia. The accession of Serbia and the Balkan states to the European Union is seen by the West as the best means to overcome the ethnic enmities that provoked the Balkan wars of the 1990s that left at least 125,000 people dead.