Belgrade Favourite Wins Local Kosovo Poll

Vladeta Kostic, the candidate of the Belgrade-backed Civic Initiative "Srpska", was elected as the new mayor of Gracanica on Sunday with 65 per cent of the votes.

The poll in the main Serbian town south of the River Iber was initially expected to be a tight race between Kostic, a relatively unknown candidate, and Nenad Rasic, the candidate of the Progressive Democratic Party and former Minister of Labour and Social Welfare in Pristina.

The election was held to replace former mayor Branimir Stojanovic, who left the post to take up the position of Deputy Prime Minister in the Kosovo government.

Media reports before the polls suggested that Rasic stood no chance against the Belgrade-backed candidate.

Rasic has had a constructive relationship with the Albanian-majority Pristina government, being one of the few Serb politicians in Kosovo who speaks fluent Albanian. For this, he has been marked a "Thaci Serb" by staunch opponents of the independence of Kosovo, a reference to his position in the government of former Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci.

In a speech after he voted at the Kralj Milutin Elementary School in Gracanica, Rasic said "the Serbs need to stop being a bargaining chip between Pristina and Belgrade."

"The Kosovo Serbs have been manipulated. The way in which the candidate [for the "Srpska" list] was chosen is not in the spirit of democracy," he said.

Ordinary people in Gracanica said they were facing more urgent everyday problems. "We need jobs, employment. Our fate in Kosovo is directly tied to that," one local man, Branislav Andrijevic, told BIRN.

The Civic Initiative "Srpska" was formed before the local elections in November 2013, with the goal of putting forward candidates that ran "on a platform...