As a candidate for Serbia’s highest office, Zdravko Ponos could hardly have had a better biography: a highly educated military man, former head of the armed forces and former chief of staff to the head of the United Nations General Assembly , whose family was forced to flee as refugees from the war in Croatia.

So since he was unveiled as a challenger to incumbent Aleksandar Vucic in Serbia’s upcoming presidential election, the pro-government media has turned everything against him.

Headlines called Ponos a ‘NATO general’ for his efforts to modernize the Serbian military and forge ties with the West as Chief of Staff of the Serbian Armed Forces between 2006 and 2008 ; the tabloids scorned the fact that he holds a Croatian passport as well as a Serbian passport, touching on the plight of his elderly parents forced to flee their family home at the end of the 1991-1995 Croatian war.

For Ponos, 59, the attacks are proof of the choice he says Serbian voters face in the April elections – “between good and evil”.

“I am completely convinced that Serbian society could hardly recover if Vucic wins again in April,” he told BIRN in an interview. After a decade of rule by Vucic and his Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, “we are institutionally completely destroyed as a society.”

Vucic, he said, differs little from his former political mentor, the incendiary ultranationalist and convicted war criminal Vojislav Seselj, leader of the Serbian Radical Party from which Vucic split in 2008 to form the SNS.

“Seselj is like in the movie ‘Alien’,” Ponos said. “Serbia is a ship that can barely move forward until the ‘eighth passenger’ disembarks.”