Brussels, 22/01/2002 (Agence Europe) - The main Slav and ethnic-Albanian parties of Macedonia reached a difficult political agreement on Tuesday on decentralisation legislation. The European Union's representative in Macedonia, Alain le Roy, announced this news at the end of the meeting of political leaders, in which he participated. This bill, demanded by the Albanians, and on which the Albanians and Macedonians continued to clash up to now, provides for a certain amount of decentralisation of power to the municipalities. The agreement still needs ratifying by the Macedonian parliament. Like Alain le Roy, the minister responsible for local authorities, Faik Aslani, said he hoped that this ratification could be achieved by the end of the week. Following clashes between the Albanian and Slav communities in the spring, NATO's intervention, and the agreement reached in Ohrid on 8 August of last year between the two parties, ratification of agreements took time. Most of the texts were ratified in November, but disagreements remained on the exact contents of the decentralisation legislation. The EU High Representative for Cfsp, Javier Solana, should be going to Skopje next week (see following article).