Pristina Picks President Wednesday, Six DSK MPs Balk

The Kosovo Assembly resumes the constitutive session of its new parliamentary term on Wednesday, September 9, at 11 a.m., picking up a process that began with the snap election held on June 7. The session was called by Speaker Avni Dehari of the Self-Determination Movement, who described the deal his party struck with the Democratic League of Kosovo (DSK) on a joint presidential candidate as “good news.” What Dehari did not say is whether the Assembly, even with that deal in hand, actually has the votes needed to elect a president.

A deadline blown twice already

Lawmakers in the new term were sworn in on August 6, but the Assembly’s leadership, a president and deputy speakers, still hasn’t been elected. The constitutional deadline for seating the parliament expired on August 7, the stretched 30-day grace period that followed has also run out, and the last attempt to resume the session, on August 8, produced no resolution either. According to reporting by the newspaper Danas, Kosovo’s budget has spent roughly 180,000 euros on the salaries of lawmakers who, through all of this, still haven’t elected a leadership.

The blown deadlines were followed by a deal meant to break the deadlock. Albin Kurti and DSK leader Lumir Abdixhiku announced on August 31, after nearly two months of negotiations, that their joint candidate for president is Bekim Sejdiu, a law professor and former Constitutional Court judge. The very next day, six DSK lawmakers said they would not vote for him: Avdulah Hoti, Hikmete Bajrami, Arben Gashi, Armend Zemaj, Kujtim Shala and Janina Imeri.

That leaves Sejdiu with roughly 12 DSK votes he can count on for certain. Kurti had earlier floated the idea that his candidate could muster as many as 74 votes, but even that figure was never confirmed as guaranteed backing in parliament. The math is straightforward: Self-Determination holds 53 seats, the DSK 18, for a combined 71. Electing a president requires 80 votes in the first two rounds of voting, and at least 61 out of 120 in the third round. The balance of power from the June 7 election alone, Self-Determination’s 53 seats against the Democratic Party of Kosovo’s (DPK) 22, the DSK’s 18 and the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo’s (AZBK) seven, shows that without votes from the opposition, the Kurti-Abdixhiku deal cannot pass in any round.

Is Kurti buying time?

Historian Stefan Radojkovic told Kosovo Online that the push for a deal with the DSK looked rushed, as if the party had never reached an internal agreement on a candidate in the first place.

“It looks like the Self-Determination Movement’s leaders were in a hurry because of the upcoming first-instance verdicts in the Thaci and Others case before the Specialist Chambers in The Hague. All these attempts, let’s say, come across as rather theatrical, especially when we see the pushback from within the DSK. We’re talking about six lawmakers without whom the interim institutions in Pristina won’t be able to elect a new president. In that sense, it seems Kurti tried, in the best case, to resolve this institutional crisis in Pristina, and in the worst case, to blow through the deadlines and extend his own technical mandate as prime minister, so he could eventually push the next round of parliamentary elections, which are now already repeating continuously, practically twice a year, further out. So that they’d be held again sometime in the fall or, preferably, as late as December, so that the Albanian diaspora could once again deliver the decisive edge it potentially gives Self-Determination, giving it the chance to constitute not just the assembly on its own, but also elect the president of the interim institutions in Pristina,” Radojkovic says.

On the possibility of an incident during Wednesday’s session, Radojkovic notes it wouldn’t be the first time, and offers this on the broader outcome:

“On the other hand, the international community would prefer new elections, but we can expect further delay and a continuation of this sort of spinning in circles, meaning Albin Kurti will probably try to push for new elections sometime in the winter,” Radojkovic concludes.

Milos Pavkovic, director of strategy at the Center for European Policy, offered Kosovo Online a similar assessment, describing Wednesday’s session as an internal deadline that Self-Determination set for itself.

“What’s problematic is that, even though they have a joint candidate with the DSK, it’s an open question whether they have enough votes to elect a president, given the factions within the DSK itself and the discontent some lawmakers feel toward the proposed candidate. So I still read this as another round of buying time. As for the Constitutional Court, I’m not sure it will rule if there’s political pressure involved. First, if one of the parties formally files a constitutional complaint, and if, of course, there’s political pressure, which we can see exists among the opposition parties, who have already staged some simulations in parliament and are considering protests, that will, I think, affect the court’s position, meaning its ability to rule on the breach of deadlines,” Pavkovic says.

Pavkovic adds that there’s a serious chance the country ends up heading to new elections after all.

“We can see there’s a serious concern that the candidate proposed by Self-Determination and the DSK doesn’t have the majority needed to be elected president. Then there’s the question of the verdict against Hashim Thaci and his potential return to Kosovo, which could further muddy the waters in a political crisis that already exists. I think Kurti’s fallback plan is to count on new parliamentary elections, and that his goal is to push the delay of the whole process as late as possible into the fall or winter, when diaspora voters traditionally return to Kosovo and turn out in large numbers, which was his strong card. Whether that stays a strong card for Kurti, we’ll see. It will also depend on Hashim Thaci’s fate in The Hague,” Pavkovic finishes.

Opposition: this is an unconstitutional breach, not time-buying

While Radojkovic and Pavkovic read Wednesday’s session as a tactical move, the opposition describes it as a further departure from the constitution. DPK leader Bedri Hamza said his party will not accept a continuation of what he calls a breach of the constitution.

“The DPK will not accept a continuation of this breach of the constitution. Instead, we are entering a new phase of political, institutional and legal action aimed at restoring legality and constitutional order in the country. The resumption of the constitutive assembly session has now been set for September 9, after the 30-day deadline that Self-Determination alone set. The Kosovo Assembly cannot wait for some party to finish its calculations. It is an institution of the Republic of Kosovo,” Hamza said, according to Danas.

AZBK leader Ardian Gjini goes further, arguing that Kurti is deliberately aiming for elections in the fall or winter, on November 22 or December 27.

“Kurti has left no path open for normal, constitutional solutions. Today there is no authority carrying out its duties without breaching the constitution, except the municipalities. Kurti has shut down every possibility of discussing the country’s future. He wants to set the election date all by himself,” Gjini claims, as reported by Danas.

Former Constitutional Court judge Kadri Kryeziu reduces the whole situation to a single task he says is now the only thing left for parliament to do.

“Parliament now has only one task. It has to constitute itself, elect the president and deputy speakers, and then dissolve and move to the next snap election,” Kryeziu argues.

According to reports from Pristina media, the DPK and AZBK have staged a fourth consecutive protest outside the government building in Pristina, demanding the constitutive session resume according to constitutional procedure. The DSK has not joined those protests, underscoring how the party, split internally over Sejdiu’s candidacy, has ended up caught between the ruling majority and the opposition.

Radojkovic says the United States has already suspended the start of a strategic dialogue with the interim institutions in Pristina, while the European Union keeps voicing concern without taking concrete steps. Political circles in Pristina are speculating that no real resolution of the crisis will come before September 16, when the Specialist Chambers in The Hague hand down a first-instance verdict against former Kosovo Liberation Army commanders Hashim Thaci, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi. Srpske novine has already reported on that verdict and its possible consequences for northern Kosovo and the safety of the Serb community there. For now, it remains an open question whether Wednesday’s Assembly session will produce a president, another delay, or final confirmation that Kosovo is headed to its third snap parliamentary election in a row.