Slavko Simic fails to secure 61 votes needed to be elected Deputy Speaker of the Kosovo Assembly.
The candidate from the Serbian List failed to obtain the required votes in three attempts.
During the continuation of the constitutive session, in the sixty-first attempt to elect the legislative bodies, Simic received only nine votes from Serbian List deputies in three attempts. Fifty-four deputies from the Vetëvendosje Movement voted against him, while 42 deputies from PDK and LDK abstained.
As a result, Simic was eliminated from the race for Deputy Speaker of the Assembly.
“Consequently [Slavko Simic] did not receive the votes to be elected Deputy Speaker of the Assembly for the third consecutive time. Therefore, I call on the representative of the Serbian community, since his name is exhausted, as the Constitutional Court has stated that voting three times for each candidate counts three times for both the Speaker and Deputy Speaker,” he said.
Earlier, at the start of the session, Basha also blamed the Constitutional Court for delays in the constitution of the Assembly, noting that it took over four months to review requests submitted by deputies.
“Since the start of the constitutive session on April 15, five months and 25 days have passed, and of all this time, the Court alone took four months and 14 days,” he said.
The representatives of the people in today’s session had only one agenda item: the election of the fifth Deputy Speaker from the Serbian community.
This is the first session following the third ruling of the Constitutional Court regarding the constitution of the Kosovo Assembly.
On October 8, the Constitutional Court published the full ruling following an appeal by the Serbian List regarding the Assembly’s constitution. The Court stated that the Assembly had not been properly constituted and gave deputies 12 days to complete the constitution process. The 12-day deadline started from the day the full ruling was published on the Court’s official website – October 8.
