On Wednesday 20 December, the Serbian government announced that new elections were to be organised in certain regions of the country, after the results of the legislative elections held 2 days earlier were contested by the opposition and prompted thousands of people to demonstrate in the streets of Belgrade.
According to a press release issued by Serbia’s public broadcasting service, RTS, voters will be invited to return to the polling booths on 30 December at around 30 of the country’s 8,000 polling stations.
In addition to the opposition, united under the banner ‘Serbia against violence’ and credited with 23.5% of the vote, several voices have been raised in recent days to denounce the irregularities noted during the elections by a group of international observers, including representatives of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
The day after the elections, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, and the Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, Olivér Várhelyi, declared that “the electoral process” in the country “must be the subject of tangible improvements and further reforms” (see EUROPE 13317/19). Among the Member States, Germany considered it “unacceptable” that such allegations could be made when Serbia is a candidate for EU membership.
In Parliament, the Renew Europe group also issued a press release calling for “a full and transparent investigation into all reported electoral irregularities and allegations of fraud relating to the parliamentary and local elections”.
“There must be no doubt about the credibility of the elections and the electoral process as such. This is one of the key democratic principles on which the EU is founded and which Serbia undertook to respect when it entered into EU accession negotiations”, commented Klemen Grošelj, a Slovenian MEP for the centrist group and rapporteur for Serbia in the European Parliament. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)