Serbia to hold partial election re-run

The parliamentary election will be repeated on December 30 in 28 out of 8,273 polling stations, the electoral commission said in a statement on Wednesday.

Hundreds of people gathered in the streets of Belgrade in the past days with demands that Sunday's election results, won by the populist conservative Serbian Progressive Party of president Aleksandar Vucic, should be annulled as they were fraught with irregularities.

According to local media reports, leaders of the main opposition force, the Serbia Against Violence coalition, Miroslav Aleksic and Marinika Tepic, have gone on hunger strike until the election results are cancelled.

On Tuesday, the European Union said Serbia's electoral process requires tangible improvement.

A day earlier, a team of international observers, including representatives of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has pointed to a series of irregularities, such as "vote buying" and "ballot box stuffing."

The Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, won 46.92% of the votes in the early general election, preliminary official results showed. The Socialist Party of Serbia, a partner of SNS in the current government coalition, was backed by 6.61%, and together, the two formations would have an absolute majority in the 250-seat parliament.