Leaders of Serbian opposition parties on a Saturday’s protest | Photo: Beta

Several thousand supporters of Serbian opposition parties staged a protest on Saturday in Belgrade, claiming that last Sunday’s elections were rigged and urging citizens to vote in repeat elections at 15 polling stations scheduled for Wednesday.

They also demanded the resignation of the President of the Election Commission, RIK, Dejan Djurdjevic, and the director of the Institute of Statistics, Miladin Kovacevic.

Opposition leaders said that although they had different ideological views, they would unite to defend democratic institutions and the will of citizens, which they said were jeopardized by the government of Aleksandar Vucic and his Serbian Progessive Party, SNS.

Bosko Obradovic, leader of the rightwing Dveri party, which has been narrowly excluded from parliament by only one vote, called on Vucic to admit the election was manipulated on Sunday, which is Serbian Orthodox Easter. “The Serbian Progressive Party will not determine the votes, Serbian citizens will,” Obradovic said.

Bojan Pajtic, leader of Democratic Party, said that regime’s “insolence and arrogance” was best shown by the fact that “a dead man who is supposedly 144 years old today” had voted for the Progressive Party. “Aleksandar Vucic is your servant and not your master,” Pajtic said.

Sasa Radulovic, leader of the “Enough is enough” movement, which won 6 per cent of the votes, said that there was numerous evidence that the elections were rigged, as dead people and non-existing citizens had voted and ballot boxes had been tampered with.

He called on people to supervise the polling stations at the repeat elections on Wednesday to ensure that no one can manipulated votes again.

“We are all together in the elections on Wednesday… and at the same time, this is the beginning of the end of Aleksandar Vucic,” Radulovic said.

Several thousand Serbian citizens on a Saturday’s protest | Photo: Beta

The RIK’s contradictory results on election night and reports of numerous irregularities at polling stations caused consternation among several opposition parties.

Opposition supporters even came to the RIK building on the night between Sunday and Monday to make sure there was no manipulation with the votes and a day later they formed a joint legal team to scrutinize the election material, claiming that the elections had been marred by irregularities.

The RIK on Friday ordered repeat votes at 15 polling stations, involving up to 16,500 voters.

They also announced the results of 99.82 per cent of votes counted. As a result, the far-right coalition between Dveri and the Democratic Party of Serbia, DSS, was deemed to have won 4.99 per cent of the vote, just below the 5-per-cent threshold needed to enter parliament, giving Vucic’s SNS more seats.

According to the RIK, the ruling SNS led by Prime Minister Vucic won 131 out of 250 seats.

The second-strongest force remains the Socialist Party of Serbia, which was the SNS’s junior partner in the last parliament, with 30 seats.

Boosted by the recent acquittal of its leader Vojislav Seselj by the UN war crimes court in The Hague, the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party won 20 seats.

The “Enough is Enough” movement led by former economy minister Sasa Radulovic, won 16 seats – as many seats as the coalition gathered around the former ruling Democratic Party.

The pro-European coalition led by former Serbian President Boris Tadic and made up of the Social Democratic Party, the Liberal Democratic Party and the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina just exceeded the 5-per-cent threshold. The coalition won 13 seats in the 250-seat parliament.