Serbia's Ruling Party Takes Over Northern Province

Aleksandar Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, has taken took control of the traditional bastion of the opposition Democratic Party, the northern Province of Vojvodina, as well as most municipalities and major cities.

Bojan Klacar, director of the Center for Free Elections and Democracy, CESID, told BIRN that the SNS was only a "relative winner" in last Sunday's elections.

This is because it won less seats in parliament than it did in the last elections in 2014, but they compensated for that by winning more power at local level.

Parliamentary seats by parties:

Parliament will still be dominated by the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, led by Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, which won 131 out of 250 seats in Sunday's elections.

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 parliamentary seats.

The pro-European "Dosta je bilo" ("Enough is Enough") movement led by former economy minister Sasa Radulovic, who was made a minister by Vucic but resigned in 2014 due to the slow pace of economic reforms, won 16 seats. This is as many seats as the coalition gathered around the former ruling Democratic Party won.

Meanwhile the pro-Russian coalition of the Democratic Party of Serbia, DSS, and Dveri also made it into parliament, where they will have 13 seats, the same number as 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.

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