Exit polls showed incumbent Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s Vetëvendosje party in first place, with 38.2% of Sunday’s vote, losing ground from 50% in 2021.
Kurti, a leftist and Kosovar Albanian nationalist, entered Sunday’s polls as the frontrunner but was not expected to win an outright majority in the 120-seat national assembly.
Vetëvendosje, on track to come first, will need to negotiate with potential coalition partners to form the next government.
Among the main opposition parties, the Democratic Party of Kosovo, which belongs to the liberal party family and whose main leaders are accused of war crimes at The Hague tribunal, is on course to come second with 22.4% of the votes.
The centre-right Democratic League of Kosovo, which has campaigned on strengthening ties with the US and the EU, polled at 20.1%.
Belgrade-Pristina revival?
Kurti’s first term was the first in Kosovo’s history to finish a full government cycle. It was marked by heightened tensions between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in the country’s north.
Tensions spiked as EU- and US-backed peace talks between Pristina and Belgrade temporarily collapsed in March 2023, much of which opponents blamed on Kurti’s hardline approach.
This also led to Western sanctions on Kosovo in July 2023.
Despite some achievements under the previous EU leadership, the dialogue had largely turned into a trialogue of separate meetings.
The EU’s former top diplomat, Josep Borrell, and the bloc’s special envoy, Miroslav Lajčák, were forced to meet both Kurti and Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić separately because the two objected to sitting down together.
The EU had urged Kosovo to establish an association of Serb municipalities to allow greater self-governance for Serbs. But fearing secession of the areas, Kurti has rejected the proposal and largely moved to further restrict Serbs’ autonomy in the country’s north.
While the EU’s new chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, met both leaders bilaterally in December, EU officials said the first official round of talks under the EU-facilitated dialogue was held off until after the Kosovo elections.
A date for a new round of talks has not yet been set.
EU diplomats, however, hope that Kallas and the bloc’s new special representative for the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue, Peter Sørensen, will be able to break the current stalemate. Sørensen, a Danish diplomat, has three decades of work experience in the Western Balkans.
Trump’s ‘special mission’
The real wild card will be how the new US administration will position itself in the Western Balkans, as Kurti’s relations with the first Trump administration were rocky.
Those ties are likely to deteriorate further because the new US president has appointed Richard Grenell, a former US emissary for the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue who has clashed with Kurti in the past, as his new presidential envoy for special missions.
Grenell, who in his previous role was accused of pressuring Kurti into accepting a peace deal favourable to Serbia, has already indicated his line on Kosovo has not changed.
Tensions in the region could also mount as Grenell believes Kosovo’s ex-President Hashim Thaçi, who is in detention in The Hague awaiting a sentence for war crimes in Kosovo’s independence war against Serbia, to be a “political prisoner.”
[MM, mk]
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