4 months ago
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By Aleksandar Vasovic
BELGRADE (Reuters) -The ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of President Aleksandar Vucic is in the lead in a snap election on Sunday with 46.6% of votes, according to a projection by pollsters Ipsos and CeSID.
The opposition Serbia Against Violence (SPN) alliance is set to come second with 23%, while the Socialist Party of Serbia of outgoing foreign minister Ivica Dacic is trailing on 6.9%.
The pollsters, whose vote projections are based on a partial count of a representative sample of polling stations, said that by 7 p.m. (1900 GMT) turnout was 55.9%.
A total of 18 parties and alliances are vying for the support of the 6.5 million-strong electorate for 250 seats in parliament. The threshold for entering parliament is 3% of votes.
Two mass shootings in May, resulting in 18 deaths, including nine elementary school students, triggered protests that shook Vucic and the SNS’s decade-long grip on power. The discontent was made worse by rising inflation, which hit 8% in November.
Opposition parties and rights watchdogs also accuse Vucic and the SNS of bribing voters, stifling media freedom, violence against opponents, corruption and ties with organised crime. Vucic and his allies deny these allegations.
CeSID and IPSOS, which are jointly monitoring Sunday’s vote, reported irregularities including organised arrivals of voters at polling stations, photographing of ballots, and procedural errors.
The state Election Commission said election monitors from the CRTA watchdog were attacked in northern Serbia. One person was later arrested in connection with the incident, police said.
The parliamentary election, the fifth since 2012, coincides with local votes in most municipalities, the capital Belgrade and the northern province of Vojvodina.
Serbia, a candidate to join the European Union, must first normalise relations with Kosovo, its former predominantly Albanian province that declared independence in 2008 after a guerrilla uprising in the late 1990s. EU-brokered talks between Belgrade and Pristina are stalled and tensions remain high.
Serbia must also root out corruption and organised crime, liberalise the economy and align its foreign policies with those of the EU, including the introduction of sanctions against its traditional ally Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine.
(Reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic and Ivana Sekularac; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien, Alex Richardson, Alison Williams and Giles Elgood)
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