Members of Parliament from the DUI party did not sign on to the request to re-call the Parliament. The letter sent to Speaker Talat Xhaferi is signed by 35 members of Parliament, coming from the ruling SDSM party, its coalition members, several smaller ethnic Albanian parties and the blackmailed group of former VMRO-DPMNE representatives.
VMRO-DPMNE already announced it will not support this move. The Parliament dissolved in mid February to make way for elections on April 12, which were then called off because of the coronavirus but no alternative date was set. The push to re-call the dissolved Parliament raised concerns that SDSM will try to force elections at a new date unilaterally, even before the epidemic has fully passed, to avoid suffering the full weight of its mishandling of both the healthcare crisis and the economic crisis.
Party leaders and legal experts discussed the issue once, convened by President Stevo Pendarovski, but could not reach agreement on how to move forward – even on finding a legally acceptable way to call off the elections. The Government simply ordered the electoral commission to stop their preparations.
A dubious precedent to re-call an already dissolved Parliament was already done once in 2016, again on request of SDSM, but it included having the Constitutional Court nullify the order to dissolve the Parliament on a trumped up technicality. Now both the Court and Speaker Xhaferi are rejecting the notion that the Parliament can re-convene.
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