Supporters of ultra-nationalist Serbian presidential candidate Tomislav Nikolić show their colours in a spirited final rally before Sunday’s election

As the crowd in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, waved heart-shaped balloons and clapped their hands, a parade of stiletto-heeled singers crooned folk songs to an accordion-led band.

Humming along was Ljubivoje Rajković, a 55-year-old farmer who hoped elections on Sunday would give Serbia a new president who could restore the country to what he called "its rightful glory".

"Poverty," says Rajković, summing up in a single word the reason he and more than 20,000 others had come to cheer Tomislav Nikolić, the ultra-nationalist presidential candidate for the Serbian Radical Party, at his final pre-election rally.

"In Serbia's towns and villages, we [the workers] have been forgotten."

Rajković says life has only gotten worse since 2000, when Slobodan Milošević, the former president was removed from power by popular pro-democratic street demonstrations.

Milošević was later indicted for crimes against humanity for his alleged role in the Balkans war in the early 1990s and died while awaiting trial at The Hague in 2006.

While the European Union credits Milošević's exit as the catalyst for ending Serbia's international isolation following the war in Bosnia and Croatia, workers like Rajković have watched inflation soar and their earnings lose purchasing power.

Once a construction worker in Belgrade, Rajković now scratches out a living on a small patch of land near the town of Požarevac.

Times are so hard that his son-in-law has left for Austria, where he has engaged in a fake marriage in order to secure a residence permit.

"Things have hit the hardest point, the worst since [Josip Broz] Tito's time," he says, referring to the former Yugoslavian dictator who died in 1980.

"People are desperate for some change for the better otherwise they will take their guns and go to the woods again."

Serbia's crossroads

Ljubivoje Rajković hopes his support for  Nikolić will restore Serbia to former glories

But for the moment, in the packed Belgrade Arena, normally host to rock concerts and basketball games, the mood among Nikolić supporters is jubilant.

The crowd at the arena is a mixed group: teenagers with pierced eyebrows and grey-haired men in traditional Serbian hats with buttons bearing the image of war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladić.

Like Rajković, though, many are poor and unemployed.

The Serbian economy has been growing steadily in recent years and the signs of rising prosperity are evident across Belgrade. Giant construction cranes dot the skyline and new cafés are appearing on street corners.

But many of Nikolić's supporters feel they have been left behind by the new economy.

"Money has become so important, the focus of everything," says Gordana Ranković, an unemployed 37-year-old nurse and mother of two.

"But salaries are very low. And you need lots of money to school your children."