BELGRADE (Serbia), May 6 (SeeNews) – A coalition led by Serbia's conservative SNS party of prime minister Aleksandar Vucic will have 131 MPs in the 250-seat parliament after winning nearly half of the votes in the early elections in the country, final official results showed.
The early elections, held on April 24 and followed by a partial revote on Wednesday over voting irregularities, were forced by Vucic who was seeking broader public support to push through overdue reforms.
Vucic, however, will control 27 seats less in the new parliament, the final results announced by the Republic Electoral Commission, RIK, late on Thursday showed. The SNS-led coalition won 48.25% of the votes. Voter turnout was 56%.
Speaking at a news conference after the re-vote, Vucic said he is currently working on the future cabinet's governance programme and will focus on the cabinet's composition later.
Seven political formations crossed the 5% threshold for entry into parliament, including the far right Dveri-DSS coalition and the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) of Vojislav Seselj, who recently faced trial in The Hague for war crimes in former Yugoslavia.
The Serbian Socialist Party (SPS), led by deputy prime minister Ivica Dacic, and its partner United Serbia, will have 29 seats in parliament. They are followed by the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) of Vojislav Seselj with 22 representatives.
The Democratic Party and the Enough movement will have 16 seats each, three more than the far right Dveri-DSS coalition.
Four other political formations of ethnic minorities for which the 5% entry threshold does not apply will have 9 seats and the Green Party will have one MP.
Source: RIK
Around 3.8 million of 6.7 million eligible voters in Serbia exercised their right to vote, RIK also said.
Parliament should be constituted within 30 days of the announcement of the official results.
According to Vladimir Gligorov, analyst at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, the election results are more or less expected.
Theoretically, the opposition forces would have won the majority of the seats in parliament if they had been united, Gligorov commented in an article for local analysis portal Pescanik.net. However, some of the opposition parties seem to have more in common with the ruling SNS than with each other, he noted.