Macedonian parliament speaker Trajko Veljanoski has scheduled the early general elections for Apr 27, the day of the second round of the presidential elections (the first round will be held on Apr 13), the parliament informed on its website.

Veljanoski said that he will submit his decision to the State Election Commission, the ministry of foreign affairs and the ministry of justice. The last parliamentary elections were held in 2011, therefore the regular ones were expected to take place in 2015.

However, on Mar 1 junior ethnic Albanian ruling coalition partner DUI submitted a motion for dissolving the parliament and scheduling early general elections. DUI elaborated that their initiative for nominating a “consensus” presidential candidate was not accepted by the other political parties in the Balkan country.

Over the weekend, however, the proposal for scheduling early parliamentary elections was accepted by the ruling party VMRO-DPMNE and the biggest opposition party SDSM.

Macedonia’s parliament dissolved on Mar 5. The move was supported by 117 MPs and there were no votes against in the 123-seated assembly.

Most of the available opinion polls show that VMRO-DPMNE is the most popular political party in the Balkan country by a large margin. In a survey conducted by local Centre for Research and Analysis on Feb 2-12, some 30.3% of the respondents said that they will vote for VMRO-DPMNE at the coming parliamentary elections. VMRO-DPMNE is followed by SDSM (12.4%), DUI (7.4%), the relatively new party GROM (4.7%) and opposition ethnic Albanian party DPA (3.2%). Some 15% said they will not vote, while 24.5% did not know whom to choose.