Kosovo Divides Ruling Party and Students in Campaign

Kosovo is back at the top of the agenda in a campaign that has barely begun, after several years in which the country’s leadership spoke about it only sparingly. The trigger is not a new round of talks with Pristina but the domestic balance of power: the ruling party is trying to rebuild its patriotic credentials, while student protesters are attacking it from a position nobody would have assigned them a year ago. Analysts who track both sides disagree on which one the issue actually hurts more.

The turning point was Banjska. After the 2023 armed clash in northern Kosovo, events there stopped leading the national broadcasters’ news, and President Aleksandar Vucic began giving the subject less and less time at his marathon press conferences. Three years of near silence from Belgrade have coincided with the closure of almost the entire network of Serbian institutions in Kosovo, while Pristina has established full control over the north.

Why the issue is a problem for the government

Aleksandar Sljuka of the New Social Initiative expects Kosovo to trip up Vucic more than it trips up the student ticket, though he cautions that much depends on what happens on the ground before the campaign starts and how the students frame their position.

“Vucic wants Kosovo out of the spotlight for several reasons, but the main one is that he does not want his Kosovo policy, unpopular with the broader public including part of his own electorate, to stay constantly in the public eye. The less Kosovo is discussed, the less its consequences are discussed. Paradoxically, as Serbia’s presence in Kosovo keeps shrinking, the Kosovo issue itself appears less and less at the top of official political discourse,” Sljuka said.

The same analyst believes the students benefit from bringing Kosovo back into the debate, since it lets them expose the gap between official rhetoric and what has actually changed on the ground, though he warns the topic demands restraint.

Political scientist Ognjen Gogic sees the government’s return to the issue as an attempt to refresh its patriotic pedigree, and argues the calculation rests on the fact that its hardest core of voters will not ask for an accounting.

“The government seems to be counting on the fact that while it talks about Serbs being under threat, voters will not ask ‘well, what are you actually doing to help them.’ SNS has the luxury that its hardest core does not raise questions of responsibility or demand that Vucic account for the results. That does not mean a significant share of voters outside that bubble are not resentful over it. The question is also whether this narrative of Serbs being constantly under threat is in fact a tactic to dodge accountability,” Gogic says.

His reading of the outcome is harsher than Sljuka’s.

“Students and part of the right wing opposition will have plenty of room in the campaign to attack the government over Kosovo. The only question is how far the issue can mobilize voters. The government will be exposed, because the Serbian state is disappearing from Kosovo, the position of Serbs there is collapsing, Serbs are on the verge of vanishing, and the government has no answer to that,” Gogic says.

What the student movement actually changed

Until last year, marking Vidovdan was effectively reserved for rallies of the Serbian Progressive Party. The student protests broke that pattern, and a flag bearing a map of Kosovo in the colors of the Serbian tricolor with the words “No Surrender” became one of the most recognizable symbols of those gatherings. Students use the word betrayal in their statements, openly criticize the Serbian List, and the president responds by calling them arrogant and haughty.

Gogic also points out that students criticized a statement by Minister Snezana Paunovic about the ethnic cleansing of Albanians, which in his view undercuts the claim that they are nationalists. He says they took that risk knowingly, at the cost of losing part of their own supporters, and will not drop the issue.

Was the Memorandum a smart move or a mistake

Students in blockade published the Memorandum on Kosovo and Metohija on May 17, 2026, in Kragujevac, after the text had first been read out at a rally in that city. The document’s title alone stirred more controversy than its content, since it inevitably recalls the 1986 memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Gogic’s assessment cuts two ways. He considers the document unnecessary and likely to divide part of the public that otherwise supports the students, but allows that there may be a calculation behind it, since the students cannot win an election relying only on the urban, civic segment of the electorate.

“Memorandum is a word that carries a lot of baggage and is widely condemned, and it makes you wonder why they chose a word that brings in division,” Gogic says.

Djordje Vukadinovic, editor of New Serbian Political Thought, reads the document the opposite way.

“It is clear enough, resolute, but it does not slide into extremism or excessive national romanticism. It is written in a legalistic, constitution defending register with formulations that are hard to attack or dispute, because it sticks to constitutional and international legal language,” Vukadinovic said.

Political analyst Dusan Janjic goes furthest in his criticism and places the Memorandum in a much older lineage.

“Add it all up and it is something we heard back in 1988, when Dobrica Cosic and that brand of nationalism were breaking through. Now it has been refined. This is what they are taught in schools, by their professors,” Janjic says.

Janjic treats the document’s publication as a misstep and a test the students must pass if they aim for more than 25 percent of the vote, arguing that with these positions they have effectively let Vucic off the hook for the results of the normalization dialogue.

This lineup reveals something telling: a student document from this past May is being measured against yardsticks from 1986 and 1988 rather than against what it actually says, so the debate over Kosovo runs through a dispute that is four decades old. The government, for now, answers by staying silent about the text itself, since any comment would force it to address what is left of its institutions in the north. The campaign will show whether voters tell those two registers apart, and how many of them vote on this issue at all.