BELGRADE – According to unconfirmed information received by European Western Balkans, facilitators of the dialogue between Serbian members of parliament on 9 and 10 October will be former MEPs Eduard Kukan and Knut Fleckenstein, while the current MEPs responsible for Serbia will get involved in the later rounds.
Kukan and Fleckenstein lead preliminary talks with the representatives of political parties in Serbia at the end of August, after which the Chair of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee David McAllister proposed an EP-facilitated dialogue on electoral conditions in a letter to the Speaker of the National Assembly of Serbia Maja Gojković.
The letter came following the announcement of boycott of the 2020 parliamentary election by a large part of the opposition, which accuses the government of denying them conditions for free and fair elections.
Representatives of each political group in the parliament of Serbia, together with one politician and, optionally, a political adviser, are invited to the meeting on 9 and 10 October, EWB finds out. The meeting will be held without media presence and under “Chatham House” rules of procedure.
The issues discussed will be electoral bodies, media and the role of the public broadcaster, transparency of the list of voters, campaign finance and the training of voters.
Two additional rounds of meetings are expected by the end of the year, in which MEPs from the EP Delegation to Serbia will probably get involved. This Delegation is chaired by Tanja Fajon, while the new Rapporteur for Serbia has not been elected yet.
As announced in McAllister’s letter, the second part of the dialogue should take place after the parliamentary election and focus on the work of the parliament.
Kukan and Fleckenstein were a part of “Troika” of the European Parliament, which mediated the resolution of the political crisis in Macedonia in 2015-2016.