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Balkan Insight (8 August 2017)

Ethnic Serb MPs will support the PAN coalition’s candidate for Kosovo parliament speaker, but that does not mean they will join the coalition led by the party of President Hashim Thaci.

Srpska Lista (Serbian List), the main coalition representing the Serb community in Kosovo, said that it will back the candidate for speaker proposed by the PAN coalition, led by the Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK, at the constitutive session of the parliament on Thursday.

"We are insisting that this process is finished as soon as possible, so that we can start solving the problems that citizens are facing," the spokesman for Srpska Lista, Igor Simic, told Radio Free Europe on Tuesday evening.

Kosovo’s parliament has so far twice failed to vote for a new speaker because the parties comprising the PAN coalition were in disagreement over who should be the candidate.

PAN is a coalition made up of the PDK, the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, AAK and the Initiative for Kosovo, NISMA, and came first with 39 seats at the June 11 elections, which gives it the right to propose the candidate for speaker.

Srpska Lista has nine of the ten MP positions in the Kosovo parliament that are reserved for Serbs.

Simic told BIRN last month that Srpska Lista will only support those who "respect Serbian interests and work to respect the rights of Serbs and improve the position of the Serbian people".

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/kosovo-serb-party-to-support-pan-coalition-candidate-08-08-2017