Kurti, Abdixhiku Pick Bekim Sejdiu for Kosovo President

Self-Determination Movement (Vetevendosje) leader Albin Kurti and Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) chairman Lumir Abdixhiku agreed on the evening of August 31 on a joint candidate for president of Kosovo. Their choice fell on Bekim Sejdiu, a law professor at the University of Pristina and a former Constitutional Court judge, who accepted the nomination at a joint press conference the two parties held after their meeting. The agreement came after nearly two months of negotiations and weeks of institutional gridlock, but it does not by itself mean Sejdiu has been elected: the Kosovo Assembly still had not been constituted on the day the deal was announced.

Talks between Vetevendosje and the LDK, Abdixhiku said after the meeting, have been running since July 9, when the two parties began discussing institutional stability and the choice of president. He described the negotiations as neither easy nor quick, calling them intensive and exhaustive, and said several names were considered before the two sides settled on Sejdiu as a consensus candidate. The goal, he said, was to find a figure with broad support whose professional and public record would match the kind of president Kurti and Abdixhiku had already agreed on in principle.

The path to a name ran through several public milestones. On August 18, Kurti and Abdixhiku said they agreed in principle that the next president should not be a party figure but someone who commands respect and can represent political unity, though without naming anyone at that point. Only on August 26 did the two sides confirm for the first time that specific names were on the table, when Kurti described the talks as very difficult and Abdixhiku spoke of a step forward. An attempt to constitute the Assembly on August 28 failed, and two days later Kurti and Abdixhiku sat down again, this time joined by former president Vjosa Osmani, with the aim, as Kurti put it then, of avoiding another unnecessary election.

Sejdiu himself said after the agreement was announced that Vetevendosje and the LDK had spent the preceding days in intensive talks to find a candidate without a party background, and that being the two parties’ consensus choice was an honor.

I accepted this proposal, even though my ambitions have always leaned more toward academic and professional pursuits. Still, fully aware of the burden and responsibility carried by the office of president, as well as the current political context, I have put myself at the service of the Republic of Kosovo, its citizens and our state, to serve them with dedication.

He added that a political agreement does not mean the process is finished.

As we all know, the process of electing the president of the Republic of Kosovo has both a political dimension and a constitutional procedure in the Assembly.

Sejdiu was born in 1974. He graduated from the University of Pristina’s Law Faculty in 1999 and earned a doctorate in international and diplomatic studies from the New University in Slovenia. He entered diplomacy in 2008 as charge d’affaires in Ankara, then in 2009 became Kosovo’s first ambassador to Turkey, a post he held until 2012. He went on to serve as consul general in New York until 2014, when he was also named ambassador designate to Canada. Then President Atifete Jahjaga appointed him to the Constitutional Court in April 2015, and he remained on the bench until May 2021, when he resigned to return to academia. From late 2021 he advised President Vjosa Osmani, and in 2024 he co-authored a study on Russian influence over the Belgrade Pristina dialogue with Lulzim Peci for the KIPRED institute, which he also co-founded.

For Serbian audiences, the most consequential line in Sejdiu’s biography is a dissenting opinion he wrote in 2015, when the Constitutional Court ruled on the principles for the Association of Serb Municipalities agreed in Brussels. As a judge, he did not accept how the majority framed the ruling, writing in his dissent that the agreed principles breached core constitutional principles because, in his reading, they envisioned a structure with features of a separate self-governing unit. At the same time, he stated explicitly that municipalities with a Serb majority have the right to associate, but only within the existing constitutional and legal order. Since the Association of Serb Municipalities still has not been formed and the issue remains open in the Belgrade Pristina dialogue, Sejdiu’s earlier position will be one of the yardsticks, if he is elected, for how he approaches Serbs and this question.

Acting President Albulena Haxhiu welcomed the agreement between Vetevendosje and the LDK, calling it an important step out of the institutional deadlock, but said the work is not finished. “It is now important for this process to be completed in the Assembly,” said Haxhiu, who has held the post since early April, after Vjosa Osmani’s term ended and the previous Assembly convocation failed to elect her successor.

The political arithmetic behind the deal is not settled on its own. Vetevendosje won 53 seats in the June 7 snap parliamentary election and the LDK won 18, 71 seats between them. Electing a president requires a two thirds majority of 80 votes in the first two rounds of voting, with a simple majority of 61 votes sufficient only in a third round. That means Kurti and Abdixhiku will need support beyond their own ranks even with an agreement in hand, while the Assembly itself remains unconstituted: lawmakers elected on June 7 were sworn in in early August, but the chamber’s leadership has not been elected, even though the Constitutional Court had set August 7 as the deadline for constituting the body. Kurti insisted a political agreement on the future president be reached before the Assembly’s leadership was elected, arguing that constituting the chamber without such a deal could quickly push the country back to another election, a reading that lawyers and the opposition disputed, arguing the question of a future president could not be made a condition for completing the constitutive session. The Assembly was not constituted on August 28 either, when lawmakers from PDK and AAK gathered again in the chamber alongside representatives of the US embassy and the EU Office, while Kurti and speaker Avni Dehari held to their position that a political agreement had to come first.

That agreement came today, the first since the current crisis began, but no date has yet been announced for when the Assembly will meet again or when a vote on Sejdiu’s candidacy will actually be scheduled.