LDK sets three conditions for a deal with Vetevendosje

An extraordinary congress of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) in Pristina returned the negotiating mandate to party leader Lumir Abdixhiku on Thursday, July 30, clearing the way for talks with Vetevendosje on forming a government. Deputy leader Lutfi Haziri announced the decision as soon as the congress closed. Serbian media picked it up a day later.

The mandate came with a price list. Haziri laid out three conditions the LDK attaches to any coalition, and the clock on them is measured in days: the constitutive session of the Kosovo Assembly is set for August 6 at 10 a.m., one day before the legal deadline expires.

The three conditions on the table

• agreement on everything or on nothing, meaning no partial deal on individual points
• alignment on the state agenda, sector policies and the programme of the future government
• a division of responsibilities that follows from the first two, discussed only once the substance is settled

The order is deliberate. Haziri said names and portfolios come up only after the programme is agreed, and stressed that the LDK is an indispensable partner in any arrangement put together in Pristina. The party that finished third in June offered its numbers, then tied the price of those numbers to policy rather than to ministries.

Why had the talks stopped in the first place?

Negotiations with Vetevendosje broke off when a motion to remove Abdixhiku was launched inside his own party. The congress voted on it and the motion failed. 170 delegates voted against removing him, 152 voted in favour, and five ballots were declared invalid.

An 18-vote margin kept Abdixhiku in charge and gave him his mandate back, but the split those figures describe does not disappear with the minutes of the congress. Whatever deal he brings back from the table goes to the same membership that came close to unseating him two days earlier.

The arithmetic doing the talking

In the snap election of June 7, Vetevendosje won 47.13 percent and 53 seats. The Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) took 19.44 percent and 22 seats, the LDK 16.69 percent and 18 seats, and the Alliance 6.74 percent and seven seats. Srpska Lista won 5.40 percent and nine of the ten seats guaranteed to the Serb community, with the tenth going to the party of Nenad Rasic. The Assembly seats 120 deputies.

A government needs 61 votes. A president needs 80 in the first two rounds. Vetevendosje and the LDK together hold 71 seats, ten above the first threshold and nine below the second. Apart from the LDK, only the PDK and its 22 seats can deliver a majority to Vetevendosje on its own. The Alliance cannot: seven seats plus 53 stops at 60, one short.

That is the whole reason Haziri could set terms, and the reason the first of them reads as all or nothing. The LDK is not required for a majority in this Assembly, but it is one of only two addresses where that majority can be found.

What happens before August 6

The constitutive session was called by Albulena Haxhiu, acting speaker of the provisional institutions in Pristina. The statutory deadline falls on August 7, so the sitting is scheduled exactly one day ahead of it.

The previous Assembly failed to constitute itself for months, and the way out of that deadlock was the snap election of June 7. In our earlier report, Jevtic argued that Kosovo is heading for another election before the end of the year. The LDK’s conditions do not rule that out, because the first of them means there is no partial settlement: either every point closes before August 6, or none does.

The 80-vote threshold for electing a president stays unresolved even if Vetevendosje and the LDK do sign. The two of them do not have the numbers between them, which means a second round of bargaining, with a wider circle of parties than the one at the table now.