BELGRADE (AFP) – The Belgrade city assembly yesterday elected a new mayor from the ranks of Serbian President Boris Tadic’s party to head a minority coalition of pro-Europeans and reformed Socialists.

The candidacy of Dragan Djilas, a senior member of Tadic’s pro-Western Democratic Party, was approved by 58 councilors by secret ballot in the Serbian capital’s 110-member City Hall.

Appointed by the same margin was his deputy, Milan Krkobabic, from an alliance headed by late autocratic President Slobodan Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia.

The city’s new minority government matches one at the federal level between a pro-European alliance headed by Tadic’s Democrats and other parties, including the Socialists.

Supported by the Liberal Democrats, its election came just two days before a deadline for new municipal polls, and followed more than three months of wrangling and hesitancy by the Socialists.

Djilas, 41, a Tadic ally, is a former journalist and successful businessman in the media industry. He is also the outgoing minister overseeing a national investment plan.

“Our wish is to fulfill our mandate and accomplish concrete things, not in the offices but in the field,” Djilas said in a speech to the assembly carried by local television.

“This kind of coalition can enable us to honor the idea of social justice and, at the same time, bring about Belgrade’s fast development,” he said, adding another priority was the “fight against crime and corruption.”

Belgrade still bears scars from the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, when it was under crippling international economic sanctions for much of the decade before being bombed for its role in Kosovo’s war. Several massive former government buildings in the central part of the city of around 2 million still stand in ruins from the 78-day air assault, launched to halt a crackdown by Milosevic’s forces on Kosovo Albanians.

The new federal government formed on July 7 hopes to capitalize on the arrest last month of Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic by winning EU candidate status by early next year.

That, it says, should help it to shore up EU accession funds and attract investment that will improve infrastructure, including bridges and a highway that is to bypass the capital.

The Socialists had earlier pulled out of a deal to join forces in Belgrade with the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party in order to form a city government mirroring the one at the national level.

In the May 11 polls, the Democratic Party-led coalition For a European Belgrade won 45 of the total 110 seats in the city assembly, ahead of the Radicals on 40.

The Democratic Party of Serbia of former nationalist Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica picked up 12 seats, ahead of the Liberal Democrats on seven and the Socialists’ six.