(Reuters) - Socialist Francois Hollande swept to victory in France's presidential election on Sunday in a swing to the left at the heart of Europe that could start a pushback against German-led austerity.

Hollande was set to beat conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy by a decisive 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent margin, the TNS-Sofres polling agency said in a projection based on a partial vote count.

The president conceded defeat within 20 minutes of the last polls closing at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT), telling supporters he had telephoned Hollande to wish him good luck.

"I bear the full responsibility for this defeat," he said.

Serbs are voting in presidential, parliamentary and local elections in a contest that gives them a sharp choice between a liberal government and one that would include former nationalist allies of the late Slobodan Milosevic.

Sunday's voting comes after a campaign dominated by economic issues, in which President Boris Tadic, a member of the Democratic Party, is pitted against conservative populist Tomislav Nikolic.

Surveys put Tadic and Nikolic neck-and-neck in the presidential race, with their parties also running close in the parliamentary elections.

The elections are seen as a turning point for Serbia because for the first time in almost two decades they are focused on the economy rather than the Balkan conflicts that left Belgrade internationally isolated for much of the past two decades.

Both camps support Serbia's EU membership bid while breakaway Kosovo, which overshadowed the last polls, has been pushed to the background by concerns about Serbia's stumbling economy and record unemployment.

Exit polls have projected that the Greece's former majority social party has been pushed down to third place in the country's parliamentary elections, with no definitive front-runner and no party gaining enough votes to form a government.

The left-wing Pasok party saw its score fall to 14-17 per cent from 43.9 per cent on Sunday, according to the poll, commissioned by four major television stations and carried out by three polling agencies.

The conservative New Democracy party (ND) mustered the most votes with 17-20 per cent of the vote, but it was not sufficient to give it absolute majority and was down from 33.5 per cent at the 2009 election.

Al AJazeera's Barnaby Phillips, reporting from Athens, said: "On the face of it, this seems like massive repudiation of Greece's political establishment." 
 
While the two pro-austerity parties suffered major losses, the leftist Syriza party, which opposed European Union-IMF reforms, jumped to second place after scoring 15.5-18.5 per cent of the vote, up from 4.6 per cent three years ago.

(Reuters) - Boris Johnson's victory in the race to lead London through the Olympics raises expectations that he will one day cross the Thames from City Hall to Downing Street, but critics question whether he has what it takes to be Britain's prime minister.

Johnson, whose popularity is largely down to his comic talent and colourful past, won a second four-year term as mayor of London on the same day that his Conservative Party suffered heavy losses in nationwide local elections.

His ability to outperform his own party, known as the "Boris bonus", surfaced again on Friday, prompting his defeated Labour rival Ken Livingstone to put the boot into Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and George Osborne, the finance minister.

Baton-wielding police have arrested at least 400 protesters taking part in a demonstration against Monday's inauguration of Vladimir Putin, Russia's president-elect.

Those arrested on Sunday included Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader, liberal leader Boris Nemtsov and ultra-left wing activist Sergei Udaltsov.

The three men are key leaders of the nascent protest movement against Putin, who served as president and prime minister before he was re-elected in March. 

Police said they detained the protesters after they threw stones and water bottles at officers and blamed the violence on opposition leaders who attempted to stage a sit-in protest in the middle of the crowd.

European Union Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn indicated the EU would show flexibility in enforcing the bloc's deficit rules as nations across the region struggle to spur growth as they cut debt.

With economies from Spain to the Netherlands sliding into recession, elections tomorrow in France and Greece may highlight concerns that German-led budget cuts aimed at taming the debt crisis could falter. Francois Hollande, the frontrunner in France's presidential race, has called for more focus on growth in the region's fiscal pact, while polls in Greece show many voters favor anti-bailout groups promising an end to austerity.

"The pact entails considerable scope for judgment, based on economic analysis and its legal provisions, when it comes to its concrete application," Rehn said today at an event sponsored by the Institute for European Studies in Brussels. The pact ''implies differentiation among the member states according to their fiscal space and macroeconomic conditions.''

The eurozone's  anti-crisis strategy is in shambles this morning, as the two pro-austerity parties in Greece fail to achieve a majority among them; New Democracy is the largest party with 18.9% and Pasok comes in third with 13.2%; Syriza, a left-wing party that opposes the bailout comes in second with 16.8%; even the rule that gives the largest party 50 additional seats fails to secure a majority; political analysts say the most likely outcome are new elections (though not clear why the result should be any different); Syriza's leader says the vote means the defeat of austerity; in France, Francois Hollande wins the presidential elections with 51.67% of the votes; the outcome is unsurprising, but closer than what was predicted by the last polls; Hollande hails his victory as an end to austerity; the German reaction is outwardly polite, but nervous; German commentators argue that Hollande will soon fall in line with Angela Merkel; in Germany, the CDU is likely to lose power in Schleswig-Holstein, following yesterday's state elections; the big news there is the surprisingly strong performance of the FDP, which is now openly discussing a coalition with the SPD and the Greens in Berlin; Wolfgang Schäuble says there is no problem with higher wages in the engineering industry; Wolfgang Münchau argues that crisis resolution will ultimately occur through a default into the ESM, something that will naturally give rise to eurobonds; Paul Krugman, meanwhile, says the eurozone faces a choice between breakup or inflation.

I just got home, so I haven't been following the results closely, but the preliminary results suggest that major cities went to the Centre-left (Genova, Palermo, Parma - but almost 20% to 5 stelle, L'Aqulia and Taranto). The Lega still has Verona (at 57.4%, not significantly changed) and the centre-right won in Lecce. Generally, esults in the South are currently based on less than 10% of the vote, in the North on about half.

"NON siamo antipolitica, siamo una nuova forza politica". Così parlò Beppe Grillo. Il comico genovese affida a Twitter il primo commento sul boom del suo Movimento 5 Stelle alle elezioni amministrative. A Parma Federico Pizzarotti va oltre il 21% e arriva al ballottaggio, Paolo Putti vicino al 15% a Genova.

Were it up to the French citizens who went to vote on Sunday at the various polling stations scattered across Israel, Nicolas Sarkozy could have remained France's president for another 50 years. Of those voters, 92 percent gave their ballot to the established president. In Netanya, Sarkozy reached 97 percent, a number comparable to those of former Syrian President Hafez Assad, the father of the country's current leader, and the late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.