Balkaninsight.com

Stay tuned for all the latest developments, election results and reactions as Macedonia goes to the polls to elect a new government amid a deep political crisis.

The centre-left wing Social Democrats appear on course for a strong showing in this weekend's elections, although they are unlikely to win a majority and turnout could be low.

A total of 3,526 polling stations opened at 7am on Sunday for Macedonia’s general election, which is seen as vital for creating a pathway out of the country's long political crisis.

A train carrying liquefied gas derailed and exploded in the village of Hitrino in northeast Bulgaria, killing five people and injuring at least 29 on Saturday morning. 

Johan Tarculovski, the only Macedonian convicted of war crimes by the Hague Tribunal, now running for parliament with the ruling VMRO DPMNE party, accused the opposition of preparing for unrest after the election.

Two former Croatian Defence Council members were jailed in separate cases for raping women in the Orasje and Odzak areas during the war in 1992.

The Russian billionaire who now claims hundreds of millions of euros from Montenegro was only ten years earlier welcomed as a friend and life-saving investor.

The corruption trial of Palestinian strongman Mohammed Dahlan, whose ties to Balkan politicians secured him Serbian and Montenegrin citizenship, is due to restart in the West Bank next week.

In closing arguments at Ratko Mladic’s trial, lawyers for the former Bosnian Serb military commander said he never ordered the Srebrenica mass killings and the case against him was systematically biased.

If Macedonia’s ruling VMRO DPMNE party wins the December elections, anti-democratic forces in Southeastern Europe will have received an encouraging boost.

As Bulgaria’s main parties appear unable to form a new government within the current parliament, the President faces the difficult task of assembling a temporary caretaker administration before his mandate expires in January.

After Croatia's new Prime Minister raised the possibility of banning all totalitarian symbols, possibly including the red star, a professor has called the proposal risky and wrongheaded.

Several statements by Macedonia's politicians delivered in the heat of the December 11 election campaign have stirred controversy and drawn attention - and here are some of them.

Amid visible dissatisfaction with the current politicians who are widely viewed as corrupt and ineffective, the outcome of the elections looks like remaining uncertain until the last moment.

While the exact nature of CIA chief John Brennan's talks with Albanian authorities remains a secret, experts say Russian expansionism and Islamist terror likely dominated the agenda.

A team of technocrats had a year to try to turn around Romania’s abysmal record on recycling.

As we look at a range of themes, from bitterly contested elections which have occurred or are about to occur to problems of dealing with the past in the region, continuity and discontinuity seem to be the words that thread these stories together. 

The building of a concrete wall by the Serb authorities near their side of the bridge that ethnically divides the Kosovo town of Mitrovica was ordered to stop after strong criticism by Kosovo Albanian officials.

Rights activists protested after a controversial politician in Leskovac called for Slobodan Milosevic to be reinstated as a ‘citizen of honour’ of the southern town.

In a rare interview, former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, who was convicted of genocide in Srebrenica, said that the crimes were actually committed by “traitors to the Serb people”.