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SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) -- About 35,000 angry voters converged on parliament Thursday after the state election commission announced their candidate lost Macedonia's presidential elections.
The demonstrators were stopped by a cordon of about 100 policemen. The crowd threw firecrackers and smoke bombs, shouting "Thieves, thieves!"
"We shall fight to topple this government and call new general elections," Branko Crvenkovski, a former communist official, told the crowd. The protesters dispersed after about an hour and there were no reports of arrests.
Boris Trajkovski, 43, of the right-centrist VMRO DPMNE party, was declared the winner of Sunday's runoff vote. Trajkovski, who favors conciliatory relations with the country's large ethnic Albanian minority, won 53 percent of the vote.
His rival, Tito Petkovski of the renamed communists -- the Social Democratic party -- won 46 percent.
The figures were reported late Wednesday by Macedonian Television, citing the state election commission.
Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe declared Sunday's vote "generally satisfactory." But they noted irregularities in a number of polling stations in the west of the country and around Skopje, where the protest took place. These included large-scale proxy voting and instances of multiple voting.
Josif Lukovski, head of the state election commission, denied any fraud.
Petkovski, 54, has accused Trajkovski of falsifying ballots and submitted a complaint Wednesday demanding an investigation of more than 200,000 votes in the Albanian-populated western part of the country.