Ajdari: DUI calls for a single electoral district, open lists, and a 5 percent threshold

After the meeting of political parties in Parliament on the Electoral Code, the coordinator of the “European Front” parliamentary group and Democratic Union for Integration MP Rina Ajdari told the media that DUI continues to maintain the same position: the country should have a single electoral district, with open lists for MPs and an electoral threshold of 5 percent of the total number of voters registered on the Voters List.

Ajdari underlined that any intervention in the Electoral Code must pass with interethnic and interparty consensus.

She said with regret that today’s talks on adopting the amendments to the Electoral Code were unsuccessful. According to her, the failure did not come because of everyone, but as a result of some political parties withdrawing from the positions on which agreement had previously been reached. Ajdari said that DUI had been active and constructive in the working group for months. She added that a compromise had been reached on the main issues, while there had been no agreement on some other topics. Nevertheless, the harmonized proposal had been submitted to Parliament, and DUI had signed it precisely in the version that had been agreed within the framework of the working group.

According to Ajdari, after the proposal reached Parliament, VMRO-DPMNE withdrew from two essential elements of the agreement. The first concerned electronic voting by the diaspora, for which the party requested that it be carried out by mail. The second was related to the agreement that the regulations of the State Election Commission connected to electronic voting by the diaspora should be adopted by consensus, whereas VMRO-DPMNE requested that they pass by majority vote, she said.

Ajdari said that for DUI this is unacceptable because, according to her, it creates room for political engineering and over-voting, a situation that, as she put it, also happened in 2024, when State Election Commission member Ditmire Shehu was outvoted by representatives of VMRO-DPMNE, SDSM, and VLEN./Telegrafi/