Election of the weekend V: Kosovo

I promise this is the last one. We covered February’s Kosovo election in this series, and we’re back. As predicted, that election was ‘won’ by Vetëvendosje, PM Albin Kurti’s party, although they lost 10 seats, from 58 to 48 (out of 120, so 61 needed to form a government). Long story short, they were unable to find 13 coalition partners to govern with. After many court-mandated votes, another Vetëvendosje legislator, Dimal Basha, was elected Speaker of the Assembly of the house. That gave Vetëvendosje two weeks for form a government, which they were not able to do. After six more weeks of deadlock and crisis, a snap election was called in early October, and here we are.

Kosovo’s Assembly is made up of 100 general seats, elected under nationwide closed list PR, in addition to 10 seats reserved for Serbian minorities, and 10 seats for other national minorities: 3 for Bosniaks, 2 for Turks, 4 for Roma/Ashkali/Egyptians (RAE), and 1 for Gorani. They are elected via closed list proportional representation. There’s a 5% threshold for representation for general parties, and ethnic minority parties are exempt in order to ensure those representational thresholds are met.

What’s going to happen? Public polling is illegal in Kosovo, so we have no polls to consult. It’s not clear there’s any reason to think the electorate has shifted much in the last 10-11 months. It’s not entirely clear to me why the politics of coalition are so difficult here, but some reasons are clear. The minority reserves, for one, narrow the path, as the Serb parties are effectively unusable for coalition-building. They’re largely Belgrade-aligned and the Albanian majority would certainly punish any effort to meaningfully compromise with them, even if they were open to it. (And Kurti in particular has stoked anti-Serb sentiment and been recalcitrant and uncooperative in negotiations about normalization of relations with Belgrade, making him an especially poor candidate to work with them.) The other minority-reserved seats tend to be occupied with less dramatic versions of the same general problem, although some analysts think if he’s able to cobble a government together it’ll need some of them. The gap between Kurti/Vetëvendosje and the other Albanian parties, in particular the Democratic Party of Albania, is substantial and will be difficult to bridge. Kurti really does appear (at least from my distant perspective) a bundle of contradictions: a left-liberal who’s Trump-curious, an agent of de-democratization whose left-populist anti-corruption views are apparently actually sincere enough that his (seemingly) principled opposition to even minor clientelistic politics his coalition partners engage in. There seems to be a general view that he needs to get closer to 61 (maybe more like 45% of the vote rather than February’s 42%) to have a shot at forming a government.

Forming a government is a particularly urgent task for Kosovo, because some funding deadlines are fast approaching that require a functioning parliament to access:

“These elections will be the most important ones in recent Kosovo history because they are coming after one year of deadlock, but also four months before a new president will be elected,” said political analyst Artan Muhaxhiri.

“If Kurti wins again with around 42%, all this deadlock will be repeated, because the gap between Kurti and other parties is huge, unbridgeable.”

Polls are not made public in Kosovo, so there is little sign of how the vote will go.

But it appears unlikely that any of the major opposition parties will be willing to form a government with Kurti, who they say has stoked tensions with Kosovo’s ethnic Serb minority in the north, done little to improve living standards, and tarnished Kosovo’s reputation abroad.

Kurti, who came to power in 2021, blames the opposition for the stalemate and remains publicly optimistic about winning the 500,000 “hearts” required to gain an outright majority.

At a rally this week, he promised to increase salaries, spend one billion euros a year on capital investment and create a new prosecution unit to fight organised crime.

“Now I believe that it has never been more realistic than now to have Kurti Three,” he told local TV station Kanal 10 this month, using his term for a third mandate.

…..some 880 million euros ($1.03 billion) in EU funds for Kosovo’s budget has been delayed, as has 127 million euros of financial support from the World Bank, including some aimed at strengthening health and education systems.

Those funds are urgently needed in one of Europe’s poorest countries that falls short of its Balkan neighbours in both sectors.

The World Bank told Reuters that 90 million euros of that support will be terminated if not ratified by the Kosovo parliament by February 13. Deadlines for the rest are in April and May.

Some of the EU money may also be at risk, politicians have said. An inconclusive election could scupper all that money if a parliament is not formed quickly.