Party leader pulls election strings from prison cell

He sent bands of murderous thugs into Bosnia, sang the praises of Saddam Hussein and promised to gouge out the eyes of Serbia's enemies with rusty spoons.

During the Balkan wars of the 1990s he threatened to blow up a nuclear power facility and fire missiles at southern European cities.

His rhetoric is so wild and his behaviour so brutish than even Slobodan Milosevic, for many years his ally, said he was "the personification of violence and primitivism".

This is Vojislav Seselj, leader of the Serbian Radical Party and indicted war criminal.

Three years after Milosevic was overthrown and an uneasy peace finally came to the Balkans, he is probably Serbia's most popular politician. In parliamentary elections held yesterday, Seselj's party was poised to come out on top, ahead of pro-western democrats, moderates and technocrats.

Officially Seselj, like Milosevic with whom he shares a prison, is barred from political campaigning. But in recent weeks both men have flouted the ban.

From his prison cell in The Hague, Seselj called in to his party offices while they were on the air recently. "An old inmate always knows how to take his guards by surprise," he said.

Seselj served a prison term in the 1980s for championing Serb nationalism. If predictions prove true, the Radicals are likely to get more than a quarter of the Serbian vote, making them the largest single party. The results mark an unwelcome renaissance of Serbian nationalism and defiance at a time when the country could finally be looking towards Europe and eventual membership of the European Union.

The results are part of a worrying trend in the former Yugoslavian countries, where the economies remain crippled because of the wars of the federation's disintegration. In Bosnia and Croatia nationalists have come out on top in elections this year, although in both cases they have been heavily reformed.

But Seselj is the embodiment of everything that went wrong with Serbia in the 1990s. He is a visceral and violent champion of Greater Serbia, a political buffoon and a corrupt and compromised politician.

He was indicted by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity this year. When he gave himself up to The Hague, more than 10,000 supporters, and a brass band, turned up to see him off.

He told them: "God did not want me to die on the front line with Serbian heroes, but I will go to The Hague to defend Serbian national interests. The most important thing for Serbia is that I am the last Serb to surrender."

Tomislav Nikolic, Seselj's deputy, has sworn that if he gains power he will stop all co-operation with The Hague and seek a Greater Serbia "through peaceful means". Such rhetoric still strikes a chord with many Serbs, who believe, despite the evidence, that they were the main victims of a decade of Balkan conflict.

Even Vojislav Kostunica, who replaced Milosevic when he was deposed and is considered a moderate, is fiercely critical of The Hague and has sometimes strongly opposed handing over suspects.

Another reason for the nationalists' popularity is the poor record of Serbia's moderates.

In power for the past three years, they have made few serious moves to rid the country of corruption and poor management. Wages are slowly rising, but prices outstrip them and many Serbs are worse off than ever.