A few hundred demonstrators once again blocked several main roads in the Serbian capital of Belgrade on Monday, December 25, before gathering at police stations to demand the release of protesters arrested the previous day during clashes outside city hall. "The time for marches is over, it's time for action," said Srdjan Milivojevic, a veteran of the Democratic Party and member of the pro-European coalition Serbia against Violence (SPN), who stood at the forefront of the crowd gathered outside the city council building on Sunday and made no secret of his anger.

Since Aleksandar Vucic's pro-Russian right-wing nationalist party (SNS) was controversially declared the winner of the early parliamentary elections on December 17, demonstrations have taken place every evening in front of the election commission headquarters. The opposition is calling for Vucic to step down and for the annulment of what it calls a "completely rigged" election.

Initially peaceful, the rallies became more tense on Sunday evening when around 100 students broke the windows of the city council in an attempt to enter before the police pushed them back. It was not enough to worry President Vucic. "This is not a revolution, they won't succeed," he said later that evening. Thirty-eight people, most of them students, were arrested and two police officers were "gravely injured" according to the Serbian authorities. On Monday, Milos Vucevic, the defense minister, described the young demonstrators as "pure thugs without any political views" who "would do well to prepare for the January exams instead."

Alleged vote buying and ballot box stuffing

A few months after a Belgrade school shooting in May that shook the country, Serbian opposition parties, united under the banner of the SPN, were counting on the elections to bring down the "SNS crushing machine" that has been in power since 2012. Their ambitions were swept aside on December 17, when Vucic announced his party's victory with 46.7% of the vote, compared with 23.58% for the SPN.

But a report presented by international observers, including representatives of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, said "vote buying" and "ballot box stuffing" had been observed at many polling stations. Even earlier, on November 29, a journalist from the Center for Investigative Journalism of Serbia revealed the existence of call centers designed to persuade Serbian citizens to vote for SNS candidates. Serbia Against Violence also denounced the fact that "more than 40,000 people" had voted in the capital without being residents. Buses registered in Bosnia-Herzegovina and suspected of transporting citizens of Republika Srpska, the Serbian entity in Bosnia, were seen near Belgrade polling stations on election day.

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