The ruling leftist-populist Self-Determination party of Prime Minister Albin Kurti won a general election in Kosovo on Sunday with 39.8 percent of the vote, according to unofficial results, setting the country on course for renewed confrontation with the United States and the European Union over its treatment of its Serb minority.
The right-wing Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) finished second on 21.8 percent, followed by the center-right Democratic League (LDK) on 18.1 percent and the AAK-Nisma leftist-nationalist coalition on 7.6 percent.
The results were read out at a press conference by LDK leader Lumir Abdixhiku following an hours-long Central Election Commission website outage.
“Everything went according to plan,” Kurti said following the election. “We won, and this is confirmation of a good, prosperous and democratic government.”
Previously a province of Serbia, Kosovo declared independence in 2008 following a brutal civil war in the 1990s between Serbs and Albanians in the former Yugoslavia. Self-Determination (VVL) was the first party to have served its full-four year term in government in the capital Pristina, after winning 50.3 percent of votes in 2021.
Now, however, VVL will need to find a coalition partner if it hopes to continue in power — which could prove a challenge, given Kurti’s pro-Albanian nationalism and the need for compromise to break Kosovo’s international isolation.
Not to mention the prime minister’s salty language regarding the opposition, whom he described as “monsters.”
“There has never been more war than against this government,” Kurti said following the election. “With oligarchs who give money without accounting, and with the opposition who make deals even with the devil against our government. Even though they have lost again, they will remain an opposition, because they do not want the best for either the state or the people.”
Since 2021, Kurti has pressed the ethnic Serb community in Kosovo’s north, which numbers up to 50,000 people out of Kosovo’s 1.6 million population, to accept Pristina’s authority. That has included shutting down Serbian banks and parallel governance institutions in the enclave and forcing Serbs to put Kosovar license plates on their vehicles.
Kurti has also refused to honor a 2013 agreement with Serbia to allow Serb-majority municipalities in Kosovo to form autonomous educational, health care and economic associations, saying at a political rally Feb. 1 that “our government … will never say yes” to such associations.
Kurti has defended these hardline policies as a rule-of-law necessity, but the EU suspended some financial aid to Kosovo in June 2023. Kosovo’s EU membership application also remains stalled, with five member countries yet to recognize its independence.
Meanwhile, Pristina hasn’t fared much better with the second administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Since 1999, the development arm of the Washington government, USAID, has invested over $1 billion in Kosovo, but a recent decision by Trump to freeze foreign aid for three months — some of which funded Kosovo’s Western integration — blindsided Pristina.
Even if the aid is renewed, Kurti clearly has political fences to mend in Washington.
Richard Grenell, who served as special envoy for peace negotiations between Kosovo and Serbia from 2019 to 2021 during Trump’s first term, is now back as the president’s envoy for special missions. On Feb. 3 he wrote on X that to secure peace in the Balkans the Trump administration needed “trustworthy partners,” and accused Kurti of “claiming he is close to the U.S.,” which is “absolutely false.”
“The Kurti Government was not trustworthy during Trump’s first term, nor during Biden’s term,” Grenell wrote. “Both Republicans and Democrats have criticized Kurti consistently for taking unilateral actions that destabilize the region. So has the EU and NATO. The international community is united against Kurti.”
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