Krasniqi: Kosovo deserves visa lifting, decision to be made immediately, without delay

Krasniqi stressed that now it is time for the EU to make the decision without any delay in visa liberalisation for Kosovo citizens, as Kosovo has been fulfilling all the required criteria for years.

For years we all believe that Albania and Northern Macedonia have had to launch the negotiation process and it is a good news, it is a hope for Kosovo to eventually, despite the totally unreasonable and unfair delay in reporting with us, to adopt the decision to allow visa-free travel -- that is, visa liberalisation for Kosovo citizens. This is a right of ours, which I believe is well deserved, since 2018 at least, because we have since met all the criteria, requirements and recommendations that have come from the guide and there really shouldn't be any delay. Our request and our insistence is that the decision be taken without any delay and normally without any additional criteria required because Kosovo citizens deserve to travel freely to the Schengen area as soon as possible.”, he told Economy Online.

Header The PDK, speaking of the economic crisis and the economic growth in the prices of basic products, said it is a disaster that Government throughout this period has been completely underachiever, totally uncompetent and totally unable to take any measures to ease this extremely serious burden of Kosovo citizens and families.

“We have given a series of proposals since last year in terms of energy initially, feeling it and seeing an extraordinary crisis occur and everything remained silent on the part of the Government. Then, unfortunately all those predictions that were not positive were realized, but they were very negative. We concluded with the Government's proposal to increase energy to over 200 percent of the expensive tariff share. In February, but concretely in March, we have proposed adequate measures to implement Government in order to ease the financial burden in terms of price hikes. None of these actions have been undertaken and today we see that the only remaining possibility of the Government is the penalisation of Kosovo's” businesses, Krasniqi said.

Krasniqi estimates that the government's ideas to load businesses and entrepreneurs by defining the profit margin for any essential product such as oil derivatives are wrong.

The first “because it will not reduce prices to the level they should and how affordable it would be for our citizens and on the other hand it would make it difficult to function and survive even Kosovo entrepreneurs. Our demands and proposals are clear, they are concrete. The government had to remove the value-added tax tax on all the basic products that are part of the essential basket. He also had to take the same measures for the derivatives where we've proposed the removal of the excise, so that we today wouldn't have from 1 euro and 75 cents if we had 1 euro 10 euro or 1 euro and 15 cents. However, prices from flour, wheat, rice, oil, and all other essentials would be much more affordable. We need to know that the economic crisis has not yet reached the peak and that is really alarming because we will face a severe winter, which will be very harsh in the social and economic sense.”, the chairman said PDK.