By Ellie Tzortzi

BELGRADE, May 8 (Reuters) - Serbia's nationalist Radicals say they will free the country from the stifling embrace of the European Union and open its doors to the world if they are elected on Sunday.

Tomislav Nikolic, who has led the party's drive to distance itself from its dark wartime past and create a more modern nationalist image, said it was misunderstood in the West, where its narrow lead in opinion polls is a source of deep concern.

"The problem is when you say 'Serb nationalist' in the EU you immediately think of something very bad," Nikolic told Reuters in an interview ahead of the parliamentary poll.

"Yes, we are nationalists, but there's nationalists in the U.S., in France, in Greece. We're nationalists who don't harm anyone, but we also don't let Serbia go."

Opinion surveys put the Radicals just ahead of the pro-Western Democratic Party in the election race, which will determine whether Serbia puts eventual European Union membership before its anger over Kosovo's Western-backed secession.

The campaign has been bitter and dirty. Leaders accused each other of treason, lying, and seeking to drag Serbia back to the 1990s, when autocrat Slobodan Milosevic ignited three disastrous wars and made it an impoverished pariah.

Nikolic, who insists there will be no new war over Kosovo, said the party has a bad image in the West because due to its bitter opposition to Kosovo's independence, countering that losing territory was something every country would object to.

Kosovo's Albanian majority declared independence in February, nine years after NATO expelled Serb forces accused of ethnic cleansing in a counter-insurgency war and the United Nations took over.

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Nikolic says his party will never give up Kosovo, unlike pro-EU rivals who are patriots at home and pragmatists abroad.

The Radicals say they will pursue EU membership only if the bloc stops supporting an independent Kosovo and instead recognises Serbia's claim to the province. "We don't need their sympathy, we need respect for Serbia," Nikolic said.

Nikolic, 56, speaks enthusiastically of cooperation with Russia and China, and of his visits to Arab countries.

He says Serbia's obsession with the EU in the eight years since Milosevic fell made Serbia a doormat for Brussels and brought little, when Yugoslavia's non-aligned path would have been a more natural foreign policy choice.

"We now depend completely on the EU, more than if we would be a member," he said.

Serbia under the Radicals "would not close the door to anyone, on the contrary we'll just open new doors".

"Yes, this is a crossroads. Serbia could go on in the wrong direction, or it could stop and look left, right, east, west, north and south, to see where there's a better environment, more investment, more friendship, more cooperation."

Nikolic has spearheaded the Radicals' move away from an ultranationalist party led by war crimes suspect Vojislav Seselj -- now on trial at the U.N. court in The Hague -- to a party attacking poverty, corruption and Kosovo's secession.

His frank manner and dry wit appeal to many conservatives, and he won 48.8 percent of the vote in the presidential election in February. Even rivals implicitly admit he is well liked, and their posters instead use Seselj as the bogeyman. "They have nothing on me, they cannot find anything to attack on my record, personally, or in my policy," Nikolic said, "So they bring up the time Seselj led the party."

"Times are different now. We're a very democratic party... and we're the most popular party in Serbia. They can't say anything against that." (additional reporting by Ljilja Cvekic; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

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