Kurti: There can be no choice before the situation in the north is tense

Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti has said that elections in four municipalities in Kosovo's north cannot be held without the situation being stressed in that area. But, he added, Kosovo is conducting preparations for early elections in these four municipalities.

I don't think anyone expects a full passage to have a choice in the north, but of course we're still working on it. We are preparing to have early elections”, Kurti said.

Early elections in the four municipalities in northern Kosovo -- Leposaviq, Zubin Potok, Zvecan and Northern Mitrovica -- have been called on by the international community for suspension of the situation in the north, which has deteriorated two months ago.

In these Serb-populated municipalities, the new mayors emerged from the elections boycotted by the Serbian List ʹ the largest Serb party in Kosovo are Albanians. Local Serbs have protested since May 29th against their entry into municipal facilities.

On 11 July, the European Union confirmed that Kosovo would support holding new elections in four northern municipalities, as part of actions to defuse the situation.

Kurti has said the Government of Kosovo is “interested in holding the elections as soon as we can, but added that “this is out of our institutional experience”.

We'll make sure that this new experience that we have with the interruption of the mandate of these mayors in the north has legal and procedural support and guarantees. So, we have to make sure that such a process is safe enough to be counterproductive in the legal and judicial sense”, Kurti said.

Kurti also said he expects punitive measures taken by the European Union towards Kosovo to be withdrawn as soon as possible.

The EU's punitive measures towards Kosovo include: the provisional suspension of the work of troops created under the Stabilisation and Association Agreement, Kosovo's failure at high-level meetings and the suspension of bilateral visits, in addition to those focusing on addressing the crisis in Kosovo's north under the framework of EU facilitated dialogue.

Kosovo's chief negotiator in dialogue with Serbia, Besnik Bislimi, and the EU's envoy for dialogue between the two countries, Miroslav Lajcak, reached an agreement on the extension of the situation in northern Kosovo, during a meeting on 10 July in Bratislava.

Kurti said that “in northern Kosovo cannot be denied a kind of deespass that has already occurred”.