Vesna Rakic Vodinelic

BELGRADE - The Democratic Party (DS) and the New Party will form a coalition for the upcoming local elections in Belgrade.

At Friday's joint press conference with Vesna Rakic Vodinelic, president of the New Party Council, DS leader Dragan Sutanovac, who will run for mayor, announced Vodinelic would head the coalition's electoral list.

The movement 'Let's Not Drown Belgrade', which has been campaigning against the huge government-backed Belgrade Waterfront complex for years, gathered between five and ten thousand people in the Serbian capital to demand that Mayor Sinisa Mali step down.

Serbian Ombudsman Sasa Jankovic on Monday said that he will run for the presidential post in the election in 2017 - but will only start his campaign once the election is called, since Serbia needs the institution of Ombudsman.

Hundreds of eminent public figures in Serbia have signed a public letter of support for Ombudsman Sasa Jankovic, urging him to run in the 2017 presidential election as an independent, saying he represents democratic values, integrity and authority.

A sharp rise in the number of blank ballots in the Serbian general election will throw a question mark over the political system's legitimacy, experts have said.

A recent poll by ProPositiv agency suggested that more than 5 per cent of the voters will deliberately spoil or annul their ballots in this way.

"Any kind of removal of Kosovo from the Constitution of Serbia and undermining of the country's integrity is out of the question," says Stanislava Pak.

This adviser to Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic was reacting to a statement made previously by a law professor, Vesna Rakic Vodinelic.

Tanjug, the news agency founded by the Yugoslav Communists in the 1940s, is still operating despite being closed by the government last month when it failed to find a private buyer.