Kosovo Prepares to Elect New Parliament

Around 2 million people will be eligible to vote on Sunday in Kosovo's snap elections, which were triggered by the sudden resignation of Ramush Haradinaj as prime minister in July and the dissolution of parliament a month later.

Voters will head to the ballot boxes on Sunday from 7am to 7pm to elect 120 representatives in parliament at a time when Kosovo is struggling both with serious internal economic problems and with uncertainties about the EU-led dialogue with Serbia - which has refused to recognise its independence, proclaimed in 2008.

The Central Election Commission, CEC, said a total of 1,972,466 voters were registered to cast ballots on 6 October, a rise of around 115,000 names compared to the last elections in 2017.

The electoral roll is approximately the same size as the total number of residents in Kosovo, which the Kosovo Statistical Agency at the end of 2017 put at around 1.8 million.

The CEC said the similarity in size was down to the large number of people who have left the country to work elsewhere.

"The reason why the number of citizens eligible to vote and the number of residents are approximately the same is that the list of voters includes people with the right to vote both inside and outside the country - while the number of the population includes only those who are resident and were in Kosovo for the census," CEC Spokesperson Valmir Elezi told BIRN.

The elections were triggered on 19 July when Haradinaj surprisingly resigned from his post as prime minister after being summoned for questioning in The Hague by the Specialist Prosecutor's Office, which is probing wartime and post-war crimes in Kosovo.

On 22 August, MPs dissolved parliament and President Hashim Thaci announced October 6 as the date for...