(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The surprise victory of a far-left party in Kosovo Sunday is bad news for the prospects of a deal between Kosovo and Serbia that would open a path for both countries into the European Union. If the winning Vetevendosje (VV) party’s leader, Albin Kurti, becomes prime minister, it’ll be hard for him to establish rapport with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic – and to form a united Kosovan front in the negotiations.
The early election was set off by the July resignation of Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj, a former field commander during the Yugoslav wars, who stepped down after being summoned for questioning by the war crimes prosecutor in the Hague. Vetevendosje (Albanian for “self-determination”) won about 26% of the vote, and another opposition party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), garnered close to 25%. This was the first election since Kosovo’s independence from Serbia in 2008 that didn’t give plurality support to the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), which received only 21%, largely because of the party’s poor record on fighting corruption.
VV and LDK discussed forming a coalition before the election, but the talks failed; VV has a strong leftist agenda, while LDK is a center-right political force. Kurti still needs a deal with LDK to govern. If the negotiations go well, Kosovo will get a leader who didn’t fight in the Yugoslav wars – but who has quite a history with the Serbian authorities. That history will hardly encourage Serbia to desist from its effort to deny Kosovo international recognition and United Nations membership.
In 1999, Kurti, a student activist, was arrested by the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was released two years later, with Milosevic already gone, and continued running a leftist-nationalist movement in Kosovo, calling for the breakaway, mostly Albanian region to become part of Albania.
Asked by an interviewer from the Austrian daily Der Standard days before the election if he’d ever met Vucic, Kurti replied:
When he was here in 1998, he was Milosevic’s information minister and I was protesting against Milosevic. How could I have met him? There were police barriers.
The Standard interview gives a good indication of Kurti’s intentions should he become prime minister. He promises to lift the 100% customs tariffs on Serbian goods, imposed by Haradinaj last year, but he proposes replacing them with a “reciprocity principle,” demanding that Serbia recognize Kosovo license plates and IDs, which describe Kosovo as an independent country. Serbia is unlikely to agree to this given its sustained fight against Kosovo’s international recognition.
Kurti also intends to demand compensation from Serbia for wartime damage and an investigation into missing persons, which would include the opening of mass graves. He’s dead set against any kind of territorial exchange with Serbia, which would give the latter control over the Serb-populated areas of the majority-Albanian country. VV has fought even the slightest border changes: Its members tossed tear gas canisters in parliament to derail Kosovo’s border demarcation deal with Montenegro.
Kurti says he intends to open a dialog with the Kosovan Serbs and hopes to be a better leader to them than Vucic could ever be – even though a pro-Belgrade party which Kurti has sharply criticized in the past has won more than 90% of the vote in the Serb enclaves of Kosovo. And Kurti won’t accept the peace deal between Greece and North Macedonia as an example for Kosovo and Serbia. Even though Kosovo’s constitution rules out the country’s merger with any other nation, Kurti still hopes his Albanian dream can come true someday, and his party still won’t use Kosovo’s current blue flag, preferring the Albanian one.
All of this suggests that Kosovo’s confrontation with Serbia isn’t likely to subside under a Kurti government. Besides, if the EU tries to push for a settlement, it’ll be dealing with a stable Vucic government on the Serbian side and a much more fragile one in Kosovo, with a strong opposition prepared to shoot down any compromise. Besides, VV, an anti-establishment, nationalist force, is an inconvenient negotiating partner for the Europeans.
Even though the Kosovo election was competitive and, by all indications, fair, Kosovo is a country that can ill afford the kind of political fracturing that’s become common throughout Europe. To move toward EU membership, it needs consolidation behind leaders capable of reasonable compromises. Today, though 1.9 million Kosovans are on the electoral rolls, only 1.8 million people, 1.1 million off them of voting age, actually live there. Bringing back the emigres will be hard without progress on international recognition and EU accession.
If Kurti becomes prime minister, he’ll face a political maturity test. His failure would mean keeping Kosovo stuck in its limbo.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Therese Raphael at traphael4@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.