Political parties and grand national coalition on Friday set the government a two-week deadline to address their demands or will halt the upcoming parliamentary and district council elections.

Changing the election system, allowing political parties to play a supervision in the election process and the usage of biometric system were among issues as the political parties in a released statement called for its implementation within two weeks.  

“The ambiguous and manipulated voter registration process shows that the election process has been already engineered in a way so that it could pave way for every kind of systematic fraud in favor of National Unity Government leaders,” said Masoud Trushtwal, a member of Afghanistan’s Council for Protection and Stability.

He said if the government and the election commission do not guarantee transparency of the elections, the political parties will prevent the upcoming elections from being held in the country.

The political parties, meanwhile, said that they have set up a national delegation for facilitating direct peace talks with the Taliban.

“With formation of ‘National Delegation for Conciliation’ that is comprised of representatives from political parties, political coalitions, Jihadi leaders, national assembly and civil society members, we announce our readiness to begin direct talks [with the Taliban] and upcoming days we will reveal members and plans of the delegation to the people of Afghanistan,” said Zahir Qadir, a member of Grand the National Coalition.

The Presidential Palace in reaction to the political parties’ statement, said that the president has recently met with a number of political figures and asked them to present their plans for having transparent, and successful elections in the country.

This comes days after ARG said that President Ashraf Ghani has rejected the plan of political parties for using a biometic system in the voter and candidate registration process, saying the plan is time-consuming and will prevent having a timely elections.