Elections

BELGRADE - Serbian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Public Administration and Local Self-Government Kori Udovicki scheduled on Tuesday the elections for national minority councils for October 26.

By Angelos Stangos

The rabid reactions to the anti-racism bill are neither random nor unheard-of. They are in the same vein as reactions against the construction of a mosque in Athens and common-law marriage, and before that against the removal of religion from identity cards and long before that to women’s right to vote.

Ex-cabinet secretary and prime-ministerial adviser Panayiotis Baltakos says he is not poised to form his own party but believes New Democracy should be doing more to attract right-wing voters.

The Permanent Electoral Authority (AEP) has announced on Friday that in the first round of the presidential elections (November 2) 18,336,254 citizens have the right to vote; in the second round (November 16) the number is 18,334,071.

The centre-left majority in Croatia's parliament is working on tightening up the referendum law in order to make such exercises harder to hold.

The principal changes mean that in future, those seeking a referendum will have to present a clearer argument in pushing for one.

BELGRADE - Presidents of the national councils of ethnic Albanians and Roma, Galip Beciri and Vitomir Mihajlovic, invited the members of their ethnic groups to register on the special electoral rolls and vote in the elections for members of the national minority councils in Serbia set for October 26.

The voting is over and the winner is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. However, the aftermath of the voting is still chaotic. Every party that participated in the elections is busy trying to figure out what the results mean for their future and how they should proceed into the future. The reason why there is so much debate is the huge number of people who did not vote.

Campaigners against bilingual signs say the court decision vetoing a referendum on the issue is not a total blow to their cause.

ZAGREB - Croatia will not hold a referendum on the official use of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet after the country's constitutional court ruled the proposed referendum question as unconstitutional.

The Constitutional Court made the ruling on Monday after the parliament requested that the constitutionality of the announced referendum be assessed.

Croatia’s Constitutional Court on Tuesday ruled that a proposed referendum on amending the country’s Law on National Minority Rights is unconstitutional.