PRISTINA – Three quarters of Kosovo citizens have expressed dissatisfaction with the direction Kosovo President Thaçi taking in the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue, and around the same number of them said they oppose exchange of territory between Kosovo and Serbia as a part of a potential agreement, show the results of the latest Kosova Democratic Institute (KDI) public opinion survey.
Results presented at today’s conference cover first half of September, and Jeta Krasniqi from KDI stated that the questions of this survey were related to the latest developments regarding the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue process.
Krasniqi has announced that 75.1% of citizens have expressed dissatisfaction with Thaçi’s policies regarding the dialogue, in contrast to only 20% of them who have expressed satisfaction. As for the citizens’ attitude, if they would accept the exchange of territory between Kosovo and Serbia as a part of a potential agreement, a fairly high percentage of 77.6% of respondents said they oppose this idea.
Viewed by ethnicity, 80.3% of respondents from the Albanian community, 38.4% of respondents from the Serb community and 62% of respondents from other communities expressed that they would not accept the exchange of territory between Kosovo and Serbia as part of the eventual agreement between the parties.
“Majority of respondents has expressed that they would not accept either territorial exchange or Association of Serbian Municpalities, while 10.5% would prefer border changes than the Association, wile the opposite is true for 6.6% of citizens”, said Krasniqi. The most preferred option for Serbian community is the Association of Serbian Municipalities with 57%.
Regarding the question of what action citizens would take if the presidents Thaçi-Vučić reach an agreement on exchange of territories between Kosovo and Serbia along ethnic lines, the results reveal that 51.5% of the citizens would protest against this agreement. There are 20% of the citizens who said they would seek a referendum and 9% would agree with this agreement.
Krasniqi also stated that on the question about the citizens’ satisfaction with the role that opposition parties are playing in the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue, 65.6% of respondents expressed dissatisfaction, with only 29% who said they are satisfied with the role that opposition parties are playing in this process.