Haxhiu's acting presidency in Kosovo runs past the six-month line in Article 90

Albulena Haxhiu's stand-in presidency in Kosovo passed the six-month mark this weekend, and the Assembly still has no elected successor to Vjosa Osmani. Haxhiu, the speaker, has exercised the office since 4 April, the day Osmani's five-year mandate ended. Article 90 of the constitution gives the speaker the role when the presidency is vacant, and it limits that role. The third paragraph is the line lawyers in Pristina are now quoting: the acting presidency is not to run on without a limit, and the limit they read is six months.

The Constitutional Court has already put a clock on the election of a new president. Reporting on Monday put that deadline two days out, with the Assembly also due to sit on amendments concerning the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. Two clocks, one political. A house that cannot agree a president is the same house being asked to amend the law of a court that tries former Kosovo Liberation Army figures. The deadlock is not only about a nameplate.

Haxhiu was elected speaker again on 9 September. The presidency has said she continues as acting president until a head of state is chosen. Legal researcher Melos Kolshi of the Kosovo Law Institute has argued the opposite reading of the calendar. The six months, he said, run from the end of the elected president's mandate, not from the speaker's latest election. On that count the term of the acting office expired on 4 October. A speaker can be re-elected. An acting president, on Kolshi's view, cannot reset the clock by winning the speaker's chair again.

The difference is practical. If the acting office expired on Saturday, decrees Haxhiu signs this week sit on a contested basis. Foreign ambassadors can still present credentials to someone. Laws can still be promulgated by someone. The someone is the problem. A decree that a later court calls void is a decree every ministry has to revisit. Kosovo has spent the past year in a government-formation deadlock. Adding a voidable presidency to a delayed government is how a small system stops.

Osmani left office on 4 April with no successor voted in. The constitution's answer was the speaker. That answer was built for weeks, not for a season. Six months is the length of a caretaker, not of a term. Parties that have blocked a presidential vote are now inside the period the text treats as the outside edge. The court deadline two days from Monday is the institutional version of the same edge. Miss it, and the dispute moves from politics into a second constitutional ruling.

The Specialist Chambers amendment is the other item on the Assembly's sheet. Touching that court, which sits outside the ordinary Kosovo system and tries wartime cases, needs a majority the presidential talks have already failed to find. Putting both items in the same sitting asks parties to trade a president for a court amendment, or to block both. Either result leaves the acting office where it is.

Kolshi's point does not need a new crisis to matter. It needs a signature. The first decree, accreditation or promulgation after 4 October is the document that will be cited if the court later agrees with him. Until the Assembly produces 80 votes for a president, or the court says the six months can run on, Haxhiu is exercising an office that the constitution's own timer has called.