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Macedonia schedules early elections for April 27

06 March 2014 21:18 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Macedonian speaker of the Parliament Trajko Veljanoski signed on Thursday the decision for scheduling the early Parliamentary elections at April 27, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

The Macedonian Parliament was dissolved Wednesday with a unanimity vote by all 117 present lawmakers setting a path for elections a year before the regular date in 2015.

The date for national elections coincides with the second round of the Presidential elections. The citizens will vote for President in the first round on April 13.

"I want to underline that the election rules for this election process were agreed by both position and opposition which is added responsibility for both as well as obligation this to be respected through the whole process," Veljanoski said.

The national elections were scheduled after the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI), a junior coalition partner in the Government led by right wing VMRO-DPMNE, on Friday submitted an initiative for early elections.

The need for early Parliamentary elections according to DUI emerged after their coalition partner VMRO-DPMNE did not agreed on their proposal for a joint presidential candidate. DUI openly said it will not support acting President Gjorgje Ivanov as his politics were not in their interest. VMRO-DPMNE on the other hand gave full support for Ivanov to run for second presidential mandate.

The biggest opposition party, the social-democrats SDSM accused the government coalition partners of staging the crises in order to fabricate an excuse for calling early elections.

As the recent polls suggested that both DUI and VMRO-DPMNE have good ratings the early elections are primarily in their interest.

Some of the experts argued the need of the early vote saying that nothing might change as DUI and VMRO-DPMNE most probably again will have to form the government having in mind the unwritten rule that the government is constituted by the biggest parties in the so called Macedonian and Albanian political bloc.

Since the independence in 1991 all Macedonian governments included a party representing the ethnic Albanian community in the country. The ethnic Albanian community consists 25 percent out of 2 million inhabitants.

The scheduled elections are third in a row early election after VMRO-DPMNE came to power in 2006 and winning in 2008 and in 2011.