BRUSSELS (AFP) — The EU sought Monday to boost the election chances of Serbia's pro-European President Boris Tadic, offering to sign a cooperation deal after a poll that is shaping up as a "referendum on Europe".
EU foreign ministers, meeting in Brussels, said they would like to sign the deal with Serbia on February 7, four days after what could be a razor-edge presidential election.
The cooperation deal was drawn up after the Netherlands vetoed the signing of a broader agreement.
"We have adopted a very interesting text which opens the door to Serbia's entry into the EU," said Slovenian Foreign Minister Dimitri Rupel, whose country holds the bloc's rotating presidency.
The deal would provide "a framework for making progress on a political dialogue, free trade, visa liberalisation and educational cooperation."
Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic welcomed it as an invitation "to enter the European family of nations".
"We are very, very pleased with this breakthrough," he told reporters.
"We understand that this agreement is basically an invitation for Serbia to walk through the door that is now open for Serbia to enter the European family of nations," he said.
"The people of Serbia will have a chance to decide, democratically, if they want to walk through the door that is now open, as of today."
"I am actually convinced that the people of Serbia will choose to walk through that door, so that after February 3 -- after our referendum on Europe -- we will be in a position to come to Brussels again."
The deal appeared to be the first of its kind, and EU officials when pressed could come up with no other similar precedent.
"This is sort of three-quarters of the way towards signing the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA)," a first step for Balkans nations to join the EU, Rupel explained.
"One of the ministers even said that this is an even broader kind of agreement," he said.
It was not Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen.
"This text is far away from the SAA, therefore I am satisfied with the outcome of this meeting," he told reporters.
The Netherlands has blocked EU attempts to sign the SAA because of Serbia's failure to hand over UN war crimes suspects, notably former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic.
Tadic lost the first round on January 20 to nationalist Tomislav Nikolic.
The future of Kosovo, the southern Serbian province whose independence is supported by the United States and most EU nations but opposed by Serbia and Russia, has been a major factor in the election campaign.
To ease the pain of parting with the territory, the EU has repeatedly underlined that Serbia's future lies in the bloc.
"This offer sends a very strong signal to the Serbian people on their European future which is real and tangible," EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said.
Spanish European Affairs Minister Alberto Navarro said the deal could be signed in Belgrade, but he raised doubts about Serbia's EU future if Nikolic wins.
"In the case of a victory for Nikolic, things would be very different," he told reporters on the sidelines of the EU meeting in Brussels. "We might not sign the stabilisation accord or the political agreement."
Navarro said the Netherlands was isolated in the talks, which Rupel described as "quite heated".
Mladic is accused of genocide over the 1995 massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Dutch UN peacekeepers had been accused of standing by and letting the slaughter happen.
The United Nations has run Kosovo since 1999, when a NATO bombing campaign drove out Belgrade's forces waging a crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians who make up 90 percent of the population.
The ethnic Albanians have been impatient to break away ever since.
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