Serbian Progressive Party

In his 2015 report submitted to Serbia's parliament on Wednesday, Ombudsman Jankovic said the state of human rights in Serbia was far from satisfactory.

In the section on the police and secret services, Jankovic said the Military Security Agency, VBA, had actively sought information about the activities of various political parties and movements.

New opinion polls from Factor Plus polling agency show that Prime Minister's Aleksandar Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party is on course for a landslide win in the next parliament.

Vucic called early elections on April 24 on Tuesday night, describing them as "a referendum on whether Serbia wants to be a modern European country in 2020, whether it wants the future or the past".

Opposition and ruling party MPs clashed in Serbia's parliament on Tuesday about potential wrongdoings in the forthcoming parliamentary elections broadly scheduled for late April.

Zoran Zivkovic, president of the opposition New Party, said that his party, like most citizens in Serbia, feared electoral fraud.

Speaking at a meeting the main board of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party on Sunday, its leader, Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, said he had decided to call early parliamentary and local elections.

"It is my decision that we are going to have elections, we are going to be victorious," Vucic said, speaking to some 500 members of his party.

Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, who is also the president of the Serbian Progressive Party, SNS, will consult the party at the meeting on Sunday about the possibility of holding parliamentary elections in 2016, two years early.

Splinter parties from the Democratic Party will having a joint meeting on January 19 to try form a coalition in case early parliamentary elections are called this year.

Serbia's opposition Democratic Party, DS, says it is facing sustained harassment ahead of important test elections in the province of Vojvodina loosely set for April or May.

December saw the dramatic arrest of 80 people in an anti-corruption swoop, which included several members of the Democratic Party, Aleksandra Jerkov, the party spokesperson and an MP, noted.

"I would love it if we have elections and I think there is more of a chance of them happening in spring next year than not," Vladimir Djukanovic, an MP and member of the central committee of the governing Serbian Progressive Party, told BIRN.

Djukanovic said that early parliamentary polls would be a great opportunity to comprehensively defeat the opposition.

The media privatization process in Serbia finished on Monday when the last media outlet that was announced for sale signed the contract with a buyer.

However, journalists associations claim the Serbian media will not be any freer as a result of the sales.

Kurir owner Rodic on Monday accused Miroslav Bogicevic, a Serbian businessman currently on trial for corruption and Goran Veselinovic, a member of the main board of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, of blackmailing him with the backing of Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic.