Democratic League of Kosovo

The Democratic League of Kosovo (, LDK) is the oldest and one of the largest political parties in Kosovo. At the legislative elections held on 24 October 2004 the party won 45.4% of the popular vote and 47 out of 120 seats, seven of which have defected to the Nexhat Daci-led Democratic League of Dardania. One of the founding members, Ibrahim Rugova was the president of the party as the president of Kosovo until his death, on 21 January 2006. At the last legislative elections held on 17 November 2007, the party won only 22.6% and 25 seats but went on to form a Coalition government with Hashim Thaçi's Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK). In October 2010, the LDK withdrew from the coalition. History During the late 1980s, nationalism was on the rise throughout the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Since 1974 the province of Kosovo, although part of the Socialist Republic of Serbia, was a self-governed entity over which the Serbian parliament had almost no factual control (see Political status of Kosovo). In the late 1980s, civil unrest which had been striking the province for decades, suddenly erupted further in Kosovo as ethnic Albanians demanded more autonomy (in view of becoming the 7th Yugoslav Republic). At the same time, Serbian Communists' leader Slobodan Milošević used the situation in Kosovo as a political means to win popularity among Serbs. In 1989, he abolished the autonomy of Kosovo using amendments to the Serbian Constitution, reverting Kosovo to its pre-1974 status, thus restoring Serbia's control of the province. In response, a group of Albanian intellectuals gathered the same year to form the Democratic League of Kosovo, which opposed these measures, as well as the ratification of Kosovo's parliament in 1990 which returned the level of Kosovo's autonomy to how it had been sixteen years earlier. Because of its ideology, which was deemed nationalist and separatist, it was banned by the Yugoslavian authorities, together with the self-styled shadow Kosovo Parliament that opposed the ratifications of Kosovo's real assembly in July 1990. As a result, its members proclaimed in protest on the steps of the parliament building the "Republic of Kosova", independent from Yugoslavia, which drafted its own constitution. Claiming that conditions for Albanians were not addressed, the LDK successfully called for a boycott of the Kosovar Albanians of the first free elections in 1990.