Kosovo's opposition says a president would give Kurti four more years. That is what the voters ordered on 7 June, and the opposition has found a way to cancel it without casting a vote.
By Albatros Rexhaj | 1 September 2026
On Tuesday evening Lumir Abdixhiku stood in front of the cameras at LDK headquarters and read six names from a sheet of paper. A day earlier, in the same building, he had announced the candidate. Now he was announcing the deputies of his own party who would not vote for him, and the election that would follow.
Let us start with what nobody disputes. Kosovo has voted three times since February 2025. Vetëvendosje came first on 9 February, came first again on 28 December with more than half the vote, and came first again on 7 June this year, in an election called for a single reason: the Assembly could not elect a president. The same party won all three. The parties that lost certified every result and are now sitting on the seats those results gave them.
So what is the argument for refusing a president? Hykmete Bajrami gave it on Tuesday night, in her own words: her mandate was not given to her "to be a number in the Assembly, nor to extend Albin Kurti's power." Janina Ymeri: she will not vote "to prolong his rule." Vlora Çitaku said it for PDK on 31 July, coming out of the parliamentary parties' meeting with the Acting President, and said it flatly: "The question of the President is not a job. Electing the President enables Albin Kurti one more governing mandate." In the same statement she demanded that the Constitutional Court's decisions be respected without compromise. Bedri Hamza confirmed the position on Tuesday in a sentence that needs no gloss. PDK is not part of the agreement and will not participate in the vote for Sejdiu.
Notice what is missing. Nobody says the candidate is unfit. Nobody says the Constitution has been violated. The stated objection is that a head of state would let the party the voters chose serve the term the voters gave it. Four more years is the charge. Four more years is what the electorate ordered, in writing, on 7 June. Whatever else that is, it has stopped being an objection to a candidate and become an objection to the consequence of an election.
The tool is the quorum, and it is worth being precise, because the opposition is counting on nobody being precise. Article 86 wants eighty votes in the first two rounds and sixty one in the third. The Constitutional Court in 2011 added that eighty deputies must be in the hall for any round to count. Vetëvendosje, LDK and the non Serb communities have eighty one seats. The six LDK defectors take it to seventy five. That is the whole operation. Nobody votes against anyone. Forty one deputies stay home, the vote is void, and Article 86 dissolves the Assembly.
A fourth election, to cancel the third.
I will give the opposition its best argument, because it has one. The presidency was designed as the office a majority cannot take alone; the voters gave Kurti the government, not the state. Fine. Then come into the hall and vote no. They will not, and the reason is arithmetic, not principle: under the Court's rule a deputy who enters and votes against Sejdiu elects him, because his presence completes the eighty. The only way to block is to refuse to be counted. A rule that requires broad participation has been turned into a veto exercised by not participating. Çitaku spent August demanding that Kurti convene the Assembly and "restore democracy and constitutional order." Which Assembly? The one her absence dissolves.
And look at whom they refuse to count. Kurti had one office to give and gave it whole, to the party that came third. Sejdiu is an independent from LDK's own house, "an exceptional Rugovist" in Abdixhiku's phrase; LDK picked him and LDK announced him while Kurti stayed off the stage. The founding generation trusted this man long before Kurti did. Thaçi's government sent him to Ankara in 2008 as one of the Republic's first ambassadors, the state later sent him to New York as consul general, and in 2015 a PDK and LDK majority in the Assembly put him on the Constitutional Court. PDK vetted him for the Court and for the embassy. It rejects him for the presidency, and the reason has a name. Harry Bajraktari and Albanians for America, nobody's idea of a Kurti lobby, are asking deputies to vote for him. Abdixhiku said it himself on Tuesday: any name would have met the same reaction. So this was never about a name.
Now the partners, since the opposition invokes them daily. The US Embassy on 11 June and 12 August, the State Department on 20 August: the deadlock is costing Kosovo lost opportunities, form institutions "in line with the Constitution and the decisions of the Constitutional Court." Brussels put it in a title, "Kosovo Has Voted. Now It's Time to Govern," and put €882.6 million behind it, with a €90.8 million tranche already lost on 30 June. Not one of them named a candidate. None of them endorsed paralysis either. Every public instruction has said the same two things: constitute the institutions, and do it the way the Court has ruled.
Which brings me to the story going around Prishtina. In circles close to the opposition it is told in a lowered voice: the internationals do not want another Kurti government, and the boycott is their wish. Who told them varies with the teller. The American embassy. The Germans. An intelligence agency. Someone in Washington, Brussels or Berlin who cannot be named. I do not believe a word of it, and I would not repeat it if it came from anyone else. It comes from the parties whose central accusation against Kurti is that he ruined Kosovo's relations with exactly these partners. If the partners wanted him gone, they have had three elections and four statements to say so. They said the opposite, on the record, with money attached. A boycott that needs a foreign blessing it cannot produce is telling you what it thinks of its own case.
Three times the voters have answered. The opposition may dislike the answer. It may vote against Sejdiu and against Kurti every day for the next four years. What it may not call democratic principle is refusing to enter the room because entering the room lets the order those voters produced go on. If Kosovo goes to a fourth election, let nobody say the third one failed to produce an answer. It produced one. Some of the people it defeated will not accept it.
