Kurti Holds a Thin Majority for a Government, Not a President

The numbers are in, and with them comes an uncomfortable truth for the caretaker prime minister. Albin Kurti, the leader of Vetevendosje, remains the single strongest force in Kosovo’s election, but he has also lost the comfortable majority he had grown used to. His list won 42.92 percent of the vote, roughly 300,000 ballots, a sharp fall from the 51.10 percent and nearly 480,000 votes he pulled in December. The gap is not cosmetic. It rewrites the whole arithmetic of forming a government.

By unofficial projections, Vetevendosje can now count on 48 to 49 of the 120 seats, down from the 57 it held after the December vote. Behind it sit the Democratic Party of Kosovo on 21.06 percent, the Democratic League of Kosovo on 17.61 percent and the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo on 7.17 percent. The Serb List, as before, secured ten guaranteed seats reserved for the Serb community. On paper, Kurti can still assemble a cabinet with the votes of minority deputies. The trouble begins right after that.

Why is a majority of 61 not enough for stable rule?

Kosovo’s constitution sets two different thresholds, and the entire drama lives in that gap. Electing a government requires a simple majority, meaning 61 deputies out of 120. Kurti can clear that bar, even on the thin cushion of minority votes. But electing the president of Kosovo demands a two-thirds majority, eighty deputies. There the math falls apart. Not even the widest conceivable coalition around Vetevendosje reaches that figure today.

The consequence is built into the system. If the assembly fails to elect a president within the set deadline, it dissolves by constitutional force, and voters head back to the polls. A thin majority for a government, then, does not mean calm. It means a cabinet that can be elected and then collapse at the first serious constitutional hurdle. Political analysts are already forecasting a possible return to the February 2025 deadlock, when repeated failed attempts to elect a speaker left the institutions half-paralyzed for months.

That opens a second scenario, one nobody took seriously until yesterday. If the opposition parties strike a deal among themselves, a minority government led by the Democratic Party of Kosovo or the Democratic League of Kosovo, leaning on the Serb List’s votes, becomes mathematically conceivable. Such a combination would be neither easy nor lasting, but in a parliament without a clear majority every combination turns into a matter for negotiation.

What the loser of votes actually loses

A drop of almost eight percentage points is no accident. It is a message from the voters. Vjosa Citaku, deputy head of the Democratic Party of Kosovo, offered an explanation the opposition is happy to repeat.

The result is the consequence of public disappointment with a caretaker prime minister’s rule.

Kurti, of course, rejects that reading and frames the setback differently, as any leader does after finishing first while losing momentum. Yet even his closest allies cannot scrub away one fact: a party that cleared half the electorate on its own eighteen months ago now depends on other people’s votes simply to take the seats of power. The qualified majority for a president, the one that truly stabilizes a mandate, stays out of reach.

For Serbs in Kosovo this arithmetic is not abstract. In an assembly without a clear majority, the Serb List’s ten seats are suddenly worth more than in the previous term, because every side hunting for 61 hands has to find them somewhere. Whether Kurti will agree to pay the price for that support, or would rather risk fresh elections than make concessions, remains open. So I ask you: can a thin majority for a government, with no majority for a president, ever deliver the stability Kosovo has been promised for years?