SKOPJE (Macedonia), March 6 (SeeNews) – Macedonia will hold early general elections on April 27, parliament speaker Trajko Veljanoski said on Thursday, a day after parliament dissolved itself.
On Saturday the junior partner in the country's ruling coalition, the ethnic Albanian political party Democratic Union for Integration (DUI), filed a motion for the dissolution of parliament after the senior partner in the coalition, the conservative VMRO-DPMNE party, rejected its proposal to nominate a mutually acceptable candidate in the upcoming presidential vote. Parliament adopted the motion in a 117-0 vote on Wednesday.
The general elections will coincide with the second round of voting for president if the head of the state is not elected in the first round set for April 13, Veljanoski said in statement posted on parliament’s website.
These will be the eight general elections in Macedonia since the country proclaimed independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.
The outgoing parliament was elected in a snap vote on June 5, 2011. VMRO-DPMNE had 56 representatives in the 123-seat chamber and DUI had 15.
Nearly a quarter of Macedonia's population is ethnic Albanian, mostly living in the western part of the country.