Kosovo Assembly's Midnight Deadline, No Session in Sight

The constitutional deadline for constituting the Assembly of Kosovo expires at midnight tonight, the thirtieth day since the Central Election Commission (CEC) certified the results of the June 7 election on July 8. The constitutive session in Pristina opened on Thursday and was suspended the same day at the request of Self-Determination Movement leader Albin Kurti. By this morning, no date had been announced for its resumption.

Before the suspension, the session got through its entire formal portion. A quorum was established, a temporary committee to verify mandates was elected, and lawmakers of the eleventh convocation took their oath of office. What never happened was the one item the session exists for: no party put forward a candidate for speaker.

What Kurti asked for

Kurti requested additional time for talks with the opposition, arguing that a broad agreement on the country’s future president was needed. He said talks with the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) had broken down over the party’s internal turmoil, while the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) and the Alliance for Kosovo’s Future (AAK) had turned down his invitations to negotiate.

After the session was suspended, he laid out his reasoning in more detail.

Any constituting of the Assembly without an agreement on the presidency would, in practice, amount to preparing the Assembly for dissolution.

The logic follows from arithmetic: without a majority to elect a head of state, the new convocation would, in his view, quickly meet the same fate as the last one, dissolution and snap elections. The June election was called in the first place because no president was elected back in April.

Why lawyers say delay buys nothing

Because the clock Kurti wants to use only starts running once the Assembly has actually been constituted. Eugen Cakoli, executive director of the Kosovo Democratic Institute (KDI), put it this way:

Until the constituting process is completed, the procedure for electing the president does not begin at all. Once the Assembly is constituted, political parties have a full 60 days to negotiate, reach an agreement and elect a president. So there is no logic in asking for more time for the presidency by delaying the very process that starts that clock.

The Kosovo Law Institute went further, calling the suspension a breach of the constitutional order. Its statement pointed to a detail that explains why the pressure is so acute: acting president Albulena Haxhiu scheduled the session for the thirtieth and final day of the deadline, leaving no fallback date.

Under Article 9, paragraph 3 of the Assembly’s Rules of Procedure, no debate is held during the constitutive session. Accordingly, that session cannot be used for political discussions, for requests outside the established agenda, or to make the Assembly’s constituting conditional on agreement over other matters.

Former Constitutional Court president Enver Hasani raised a further question: who currently holds the office of head of state, since Haxhiu herself took the oath as a member of the Assembly. “There is no longer an acting president, because Albulena Haxhiu took the oath as a member of the Assembly. So Kosovo currently has no president,” Hasani said.

How the parties reacted

PDK leader Bedri Hamza said Self-Determination had not been serious, since it failed to put forward a candidate. “Kosovo continues to live in an institutional vacuum,” Hamza said.

The sharpest reaction came from AAK deputy leader Ardian Gjini, who accused Kurti of usurping power.

This has no other name but an internal coup d’etat. It is not carried out by the army, but by people using fragile democratic legitimacy in the most brutal way to tear down state institutions.

His party repeated that it will not enter government with Self-Determination. The message from the LDK was milder: leader Lumir Abdixhiku says the talks have not broken down and that the goal is still avoiding new elections, though the disagreement over the presidency remains. That disagreement is concrete: the LDK wants the presidency to go to its own party as part of a broader arrangement, while Self-Determination insists on a non-partisan figure it would back.

The underlying arithmetic has not changed since June 7. Self-Determination holds 53 of 120 seats, the PDK 22, the LDK 18, the AAK seven, and non-majority communities 20. A majority requires 61 votes, and no combination adds up on its own.

What the deadlock is costing

This is the part rarely mentioned in political statements. The European Union’s Growth Plan for the Western Balkans is worth six billion euros, and Kosovo has been allocated 882.6 million euros from it, of which 253.3 million is grants and 629.3 million is favorable loans. The money is disbursed in tranches and conditioned on implementing the Reform Agenda, and part of the required measures can only be adopted by the very Assembly that does not yet exist.

Jeton Zylfiu, national coordinator for the Reform and Growth Facility, said 18 of the 79 steps planned through December have been completed, leaving 61 to go before December 31. If they are missed, he estimates the loss could exceed 100 million euros. Deadlines at the end of June and mid July have already been missed, and several million euros have already been written off on that basis.

Koha’s Brussels correspondent, Augustin Palokaj, sees the math as even worse.

The loss will no longer be measured in tens of millions, but in hundreds of millions of euros, because Kosovo has already missed several deadlines. In July it reported meeting certain criteria it should have reported back in June, and now it is simply waiting for the European Commission to confirm how much funding has been lost. There is even talk of the possibility that funds Kosovo fails to use could be reassigned to other countries.

If the session resumes and concludes today, the 60 day clock for electing a president starts running, putting the final deadline for that decision at the start of October. If it does not, the Constitution prescribes no penalty, but it also sets no new deadline. Kosovo would then enter a phase in which its institutions neither dissolve nor form, they simply stand still, while the European Commission keeps tallying the Reform Agenda on a calendar that does not depend on any agreement in Pristina.