Parlimentary and municipal elections held in Kosovo
Some 1.5 million people are voting on November 17 to elect 120 members of the Kosovo Assembly, as well as the representatives and mayors of 30 Kosovo municipalities.
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Friday, November 16, 2007
Twenty seats in the assembly will be reserved - ten for the Serbs and ten for the other non-Albanian minorities.
The Kosovo Serbs are expected to boycott the elections and have been encouraged by Belgrade to refrain from participation in the election of an assembly threating to make a unilateral declaration of independence.
The Serbs are also protesting the dramatic security conditions they live in. They reiterate that during the March 2004 massive violence the Serb community had representatives in the Kosovo Assembly, but that it did not help prevent the Albanian attacks on Serb enclaves.
Ballots for the parliamentary election include 25 parties - 14 of them from minority communities, nine Albanian parties and two independent candidates.
The Saturday election will be the first time the Kosovo Assembly and municipal assemblies' representatives will be elected according to the proportional system, while mayors will be elected through a direct vote.
Two public opinion polls show that Hashim Thaqi's Democratic Party of Kosovo has a small advantage over the currently ruling Democratic League of Kosovo of the province's president Fatmir Sejdiu.
In the third place is Bexhet Pacolli's Alliance for New Kosovo, which has left behind the now ruling Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, led by war crimes indictee Ramush Haradinaj, Nexhat Daci's Democratic Alliance of Dardania, and well as the Reformist Party ORA, headed by Veton Surroi.
