Sejdiu: The 2019 budget has tremendous trouble

The chief of the Social Democrat Party's Parliamentary Group (PSD), Dardan Sejdiu, has indicated that this party has not yet decided whether to vote the budget for 2019, as according to him the budget as such has tremendous problems.

He made these comments during today's session of the Kosovo Assembly, where among the points of the day is the budget for next year.

We're actually in the budget discussion phase. The budget as such has enormous problems, some 465m euros, or more than 20 percent of the budget's money expenditures go to social schemes and pensions in a country where only 7 percent of the population is in retirement age. Since much of the population is in education, only 3 percent of the expenses go to education. Let's not talk about the economic part which is still an approach we've been seeing for 18 years now that is a total concentration of asphalt. And this time of some infrastructural momentum and infrastructural management of the economy has to be completed, we need to get to another economic and developmental concept. Imagine if in the 2019 budget we had an idea for a development agency that would help build food processing capacities in the Republi area of Kosovo. So, in the situation we are in today where we have a 100 per cent tax on imports from Serbia creates a good market for food processing in Kosovo to build new factories”, he said.

Sejdiu has also commented on NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's statement about the Kosovo Army.

We've been informed now as long as everything is being done in co-ordination with our allies, in this case with NATO, with the United States. Yesterday's statement was a statement that came as a surprise, but it's also expected, given that this 100 percent tax issue is being treated as a walk-by. What past governments and this present are not doing well is to present Kosovo with arguments and facts before internationals. So the trade inequality of 18 years has been kept silent by us... Sometimes any difficult decisions have to be made, I think the army will never be an easy decision, and we will never have from any acts in the international field a hundred percent reconciliation, he said.

Different, boss of NATO yesterday warned that Kosovo would have serious consequences if it forms the military.