Augustin Palokaj, Brussels based correspondent of this daily, considers that there is more attentiveness this time in continental Europe about the upcoming elections in the Great Britain than ever before. This, due to the promise of the British Conservative Party for a referendum on UK’s membership at the European Union, which in theory means that this country might leave the EU. Despite the frequent irritation that they cause, writes Palokaj, no one in Europe would want them to leave the EU.

He stresses the important role that the UK played for Kosovo during the last twenty years, “as the persisting champion on defending Kosovo’s statehood.” However, he adds, if the UK leaves the European Union, its importance in general, and in Balkans would only be symbolic. Writing about UK’s support for Kosovo, Palokaj stresses that they were sometimes so persistent that “they were criticized by the bureaucrats of the Commission to be more Kosovar than Kosovars, or more catholic than Pope himself.” They were criticized for their insistence to recognize Kosovo as a state at times when even officials from Kosovo accepted to make concessions.

Palokaj further writes about the role of the Great Britain as “the key actor in Western Balkans, mainly in cooperation with Germany, as in the case of a new initiative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and on conditioning Serbia’s advance towards EU with normalization of the relations with Kosovo, requesting even concrete evidence and not only bureaucratic reports of the European Commission.