Gashi insists there will be no snap elections, and his evidence is political intuition

Parliament Speaker Afrim Gashi is convinced there will be no snap parliamentary elections. Asked what he bases that certainty on, in the middle of political rhetoric that has been heating up for weeks, he answered: on his political intuition.

"In my view, there should be no snap elections and I am convinced there will not be", Gashi said at his regular briefing with journalists. Intuition is a legitimate thing for a man with a long political career. But it is not a fact, not a deal and not a vote in parliament - and those are precisely the three things that decide whether there will be elections.

The Electoral Code remains stuck

Gashi believes the new Electoral Code should be adopted regardless of when elections are held. But there is no concrete deadline. The working group exists, and the Speaker himself admits it is stuck and that there is not even a decision on when it will meet.

The code is the one unfulfilled reform obligation since the opposition parties rejected the government's proposal for electronic or postal voting by Macedonian citizens abroad. SDSM's positions, as Venko Filipče repeated, are unchanged - on how the ballot is marked and on how voting outside the country works. Levica, for its part, wants any snap elections held under a new code and proposes scrapping paid political advertising.

Three sides, three calculations

Mickoski says the government plans to serve out its term to 2028 and that he is ready to talk as soon as the opposition arrives with a single position. Filipče claims elections will come when the budget funds run out. And it was DUI, through Bujar Osmani, that opened the subject of snap elections in the first place.

So each of the three actors has its own timeframe and each is waiting for the other to give way first. Meanwhile, the working group on the Electoral Code does not know when it will sit.

Gashi also raised something concrete at the coordination meeting - ministers skipping parliamentary question time, asking the government to fix it. He himself will not attend the next question session, because of the prime minister's trip to the UN General Assembly at the end of September. Some coordinators have already asked for that session to be postponed.

So much for intuition. The number of sessions being postponed is a figure you can actually count.