Votes become a problem for Haradinaj Government

Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj and members of his cabinet have sworn in after the Parliament voted to form the Government. September 9, 2017

The ruling coalition has faced the first decision-making problem in the Assembly due to lack of votes. Unable to create the simple majority in the Assembly, consisting of 61 deputies, the Assembly has failed, in the first attempt, to adopt the Kosovo Bill on the Kosovo Budget for 2018.

Creation of the majority in the Parliament was unabated by the opposition. Opposition party MPs stayed in the hall, but did not participate in the vote. Besides them, even some MPs from the ruling parties have not been seen voting.

Political analysts consider the Kosovo government to be dependent on each vote it has in the Assembly. They say that even the lack of one vote puts Government at risk for passing important decisions.

Political development recogniser Agron Bajrami, editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Koha Ditore”, told Radio Free Europe that a government with 61 votes in the country is hard to govern a stable country.

“I am confident that, as with the budget case, so in some other decisions in the near future, the Government will face the problem of the vote and face its inability to pass the decisions that support”, Bajrami said.

Bajrami says that the life expectancy of this government depends on itself how much important decisions and laws can pass into the country. He stresses that it is still early to say that there is a government crisis, since even opposition political parties are not very interested in the government's work being blocked at this time.

The “will depend on the opposition whether it will exploit this great weakness of government and launch an initiative for its collapse. But for now I see no clear will of the opposition to bring down Government. Furthermore, we are seeing that there is also tolerance towards the government in some cases from the opposition, some opposition deputies, in the sense that they are not attacking this government, as previous governments attacked”, Bajrami said.

He considers that if the Haradinaj government could not pass important issues in the Kosovo Assembly, such as the demarcation, under normal circumstances it would be on the way for the government to withdraw.

And the other analyst, Imer Mushkolaj, says that since the formation of Haradinaj Government, it triggers a crisis starting from how and in what form it is formed.

“This crisis can only develop away unfortunately, and can bring about even more complex situations when we will really be forced to see, maybe again, when the Government, respectively, is blocked and will not be able to make the right decisions”, Mushkolaj said.

Mushkolaj says that from the first developments in the Kosovo Assembly, but from the failure to approve the budget for 2018, it is understood that even among the coalition partners there are frustrations and disagreements.

There is no unity among the government coalition and on the other hand it can also be interpreted as a lecture of the largest partner in the government coalition, The PDK's how it is able to block even very important things, such as the Law on the Budget, to show its strength and to show a message, I believe Prime Minister Haradinaj will alike influence other major decisions, such as Demarkation”, Mushkolaj said.

Analysts estimate that the Haradinaj government in less than a hundred days, has continued and added to the negative trend that previous governments, party employment, appointment of people who do not have any professional creditables in their assigned positions, commissions and boards.

Analyst Agron Bajrami also points to the large number of deputy ministers in Haradinaj Government, naming it a scandalous “cyts”.

I think this shows a very negative trend that existed even before, but this Government has raised it to a more dramatic level of”, Bajrami said.

Otherwise, the lack of decision-making in the Assembly has already influenced the two preliminary governments not to complete the four-year constitutional mandate.