Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica has refused to accept election results showing he had failed to win the presidency of Serbia in a weekend election because voter turnout was too low.
In a sign that protracted feuding is set to continue among the politicians who ousted Slobodan Milosevic, Mr Kostunica's camp complained the electoral register contained hundreds of thousands of inaccuracies and vowed to take its case to court.
"We will not recognize the results of these elections," said Mr Kostunica, a self-styled moderate nationalist whose current job will disappear when Yugoslavia is recast as a looser union of Serbia and Montenegro around the turn of the year.
Both the figures showing yesterday's election failed and the dispute over the outcome are disappointments for the West, which had urged voters to turn out and end political uncertainty. The vote was Serbia's third attempt to choose a president this year.
Mr Kostunica came a clear first in yesterday's poll, ahead of two hard-line nationalist candidates whose paramilitary backgrounds recall Serbia's recent bloodstained past.
But only about 45 per cent of registered voters turned out - well below the legal minimum of 50 per cent, according to vote monitors and partial results from Serbia's election commission.
Many voters had vowed to abstain out of disappointment at the candidates on offer and living standards which remain low over two years after Milosevic was ousted as Yugoslav president.
But Mr Kostunica's camp has long maintained that the voters' lists contain many people who are either dead or have emigrated. If these names are removed from the register, they argue, the true turnout may actually be above the 50 per cent threshold.
Mr Kostunica's party lost a similar case in the courts after low turnout invalidated the last election in October.
Kostunica won 57.5 per cent of the vote this time, while Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, under investigation by the UN war crimes court for paramilitary killings in Croatia, scored 36.3 per cent. Borislav Pelevic, an expert kick-boxer and former ally of slain Serb warlord Arkan, garnered 3.6 per cent.