Nenad Rasic, newly elected deputy Parliament speaker from the Kosovo Serb community. Photo: BIRN
Kosovo MPs elected an ethnic Serb deputy speaker on Friday, finalising the formation of a new government after nearly nine months of deadlock.
“I have the pleasure [to announce] that with 71 votes in favour, we have elected the last [deputy] leader [of the parliament] and have declared the Parliament constituted,” parliament speaker Dimal Basha said on Friday, after the vote for Rasic. “The procedure was absolutely correct. The nine MPs [from Srpska Lista] were proposed and exhausted.”
But the breakthrough was quickly challenged.
Belgrade-backed party Srpska Lista, representing Kosovo Serbs, said it objects the decision because it says Nenad Rasic, elected as the last of parliament’s five deputy speakers, is not from its ranks. None of the candidates for deputy proposed by Srpska Lista received enough votes.
Basha told the media Kosovo’s constitution does not specify to which Serbian party the Serbian deputy speaker must belong to, it only says that they should be from the Serb community.
Kosovo’s legal framework provides for the election of three deputy speakers from the Albanian community, one from the Serb community, and one from the other non-majority ethnic communities. The failure to elect an ethnic Serb deputy Speaker in late August led to Srpska Lista filing a complaint to the constitutional court. The court’s verdict, published on Wednesday, obliged the MPs to elect a Serb deputy Speaker and inaugurate the Parliament within 12 days.
After Rasic’s election, parliament was declared constituted. Nonetheless, Igor Simic, an MP from Srpska Lista, told the media after the vote that his party disagreed.
“Once again it was proven that justice and law do not exist. Today the constitution of the parliamentary session has not been completed, and do not let them lie to you,” Simic said. He said the constitutional court, Kosovo’s constitution, and parliament’s internal regulation had all been violated.
“The winner of the elections from the Serbian community must have the exclusive right to propose the deputy speaker of the parliament from the Serbian community,” said Simic. According to him, Rasic “was forcibly elected as an MP, and now as a deputy speaker” and does not represent the majority of the Serb community.
It is not yet clear whether Sprska Lista will make an official complaint to the Constitutional Court.
Other party leaders were sceptical that the long deadlock in parliament had finally been broken.
Memli Krasniqi, the leader of the Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK, told the media that he was not sure parliament has been fully inaugurated. Meanwhile the leader of the Social Democratic Initiative, NISMA, Fatmir Limaj, told local Kosovo media Klan Kosova that the election of Rasic as the Serb deputy Speaker is “unconstitutional” claiming that Srpska Lista, as the Serbian party with the majority of MPs, has the right to propose the Serb deputy Speaker.
The election of a speaker and a full quota of deputies would open the way for the President of Kosovo to hand Vetevendosje, as the biggest party in the parliament, a mandate to form a new government. However, with only 48 seats in the 120-seat parliament, its leader, Albin Kurti, would still need coalition agreements with other parties.
