The final results from last month’s elections belatedly clear the way for a new administration to be formed as soon as the dispute over who has the right to govern is resolved.

The Central Election Commission on Thursday announced its final tally which closely resembled the preliminary figures from the June 8 national polls that gave the lead to Hashim Thaci’s ruling Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK.

The PDK has won 30.38 per cent of the votes and will have 37 seats in the new parliament, followed by Isa Mustafa’s Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK, which got 25.24 per cent of the vote and will have 30 MPs, the final results say.

Albin Kurti’s Vetevendosje Movement received 13.59 per cent of the vote and will have 16 seats, while Ramush Haradinaj’s Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, AAK, won 9.54 per cent and will be represented by 11 lawmakers in parliament.

Compared to the last national polls held in 2010, the PDK will have four more seats in parliament and the LDK will be represented by three more MPs.

Meanwhile the Vetevendosje Movement won two more seats and the AAK maintained its 11 seats.

One of the newcomers, the Serb party called Srpska List, won 5.22 per cent and will have nine seats in parliament, while its ally Slobodan Petrovic’s Independent Liberal Party will have one MP.

Srpska’s MPs, who have up to now refused to be part of the Pristina-run system, will take up seats in the Kosovo parliament for the first time since the end of conflict in the late 1990s.

The other newcomer, Nisma per Kosoven [Initiative for Kosovo], established by PDK defectors Fatmir Limaj and Jakup Krasniqi, will have six MPs.

However Behgjet Pacolli’s New Kosovo Alliance, AKR, won no seats, although the party claims that its failure was caused by fraud by its competitors.

“If there had been a fair and regular election process, we would have had 10 lawmakers, but votes were stolen from us,” Myzejene Selmani from the AKR told BIRN.

Parties representing other ethnic minorities will have ten guaranteed seats in parliament.

The results must be certified before Atifete Jahjaga, the Kosovo president, can nominate a candidate to form the new government.

But the head of the Central Election Commission, Valdete Daka, said that “political parties and candidates will have 24 hours to file a complaint”. The complaints, if any, must be resolved before the elections can be certified.

Despite the final count, it remains unclear who will be nominated to establish a new government in Pristina.

The PDK’s expectations that it would form the next administration have been challenged by the LDK, AAK and Nisma per Kosoven, which formed an opposition coalition in a bid to rule instead.

The dispute might be resolved after the constitutional court clarifies how the president should act in such situations./balkaninsight/