Some words for the weekend: Elections, elections, elections

You know that one of my favourite topics for this blog are the European Parliament elections.

But for the next three weekends, my eyes will be on the three South-eastern "M"s: Macedonia, Montenegro, Moldova.

This weekend, there will be presidential elections in Macedonia (22 March; see also A Fistful of Euros), next weekend we will see early parliamentary elections in Montenegro (29 March), and in the third week we'll get parliamentary elections in Moldova (5 April), which in the latter case also means presidential elections because the Moldovan president is elected by the parliament.

Beside the fact that all these elections are crucial for the further democratic development of these three European countries, the almost parallel elections put a lot of political weight and logistical pressure on OSCE/ODIHR and other international organisations like the Council of Europe, which have to co-ordinate three election observation missions at the same time.

All interim reports regarding the three elections are published on the ODIHR homepage, and I can only recommend reading them.

When it comes to me, I will now start to enjoy my last weekend in this country, meet friends, enjoy life, and don't care (much) about politics and administration, international organisations, and whatever else kept me busy all these weeks.

Have a nice weekend - and see you next week, everyone!

Montenegro wants to join EU

There we go: News services report that Montenegro wants to join the European Union.

However,

"The commission says the country is still lagging behind in many fields and EU membership is not expected to occur in the very near future."

But since the Czech EU-Council presidency seems to be interested to speed up the accession process for the Western Balkan states, Montenegro could get the candidate status during next year.

Nevertheless, when you look at the georaphic position of Montenegro, it won't get into the Union before its main neighbours, no matter how quick it pursues its reforms. An EU peninsula Montenegra (assuming that Croatia joins the EU) will not be approved by the Council, and so Montenegro will most probably have to wait for Serbia and/or Bosnia to get ready anyway.