Justina Shiroka Pula takes the Kosovo presidency with 81 votes, one over the line

Kosovo's parliament elected Justina Shiroka Pula president in the first minutes of Wednesday, 7 October 2026, with 81 votes in the 120-seat chamber. She needed 80. A miss would have dissolved the assembly and sent the country to a snap election, which is what happened in June when an earlier attempt failed.

Shiroka Pula, born in 1953, is an economist, a professor, and the president of the Kosovo Academy of Sciences and Arts. She was minister of economy from 2008 to 2011. Reuters described the presidency as largely ceremonial, and described her as a compromise candidate who emerged late on Tuesday after Prime Minister Albin Kurti's Vetevendosje party and the opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo reached a deal.

The deal was not only about a name. It included an agreement to limit the powers of the Kosovo specialist chambers in The Hague, the court that tries crimes from the 1998-99 war. On 16 September that court sentenced former president Hashim Thaci and three others to a combined 81 years for war crimes during the break from Serbia. Critics of the court say the sentences are too harsh. On Monday, police in Pristina used tear gas and water cannon against demonstrators who wanted the changes approved before the presidential vote.

After the count, Shiroka Pula said the mandate did not belong to one person. "It belongs to our citizens," she said. "I will be the president of all citizens." The line is the standard one for a compromise winner. The arithmetic under it is not standard. Kosovo needs a two-thirds majority to elect a president, which is why a small country with a ceremonial head of state keeps falling into election cycles. Parties that cannot agree on a candidate lose the assembly. June was the last time that happened. Wednesday morning was the avoidance of a repeat.

The Hague amendment is the price of the 81 votes. A court that has just jailed a former president is now the subject of a domestic deal to cut its reach, struck between the governing party and the party most associated with the wartime Kosovo Liberation Army. The Democratic Party of Kosovo is the PDK, Thaci's old political home. Vetevendosje spent years attacking that generation. The two of them supplied the majority that put an economist in the presidency and a limit on the specialist chambers on the same night.

What the limit contains was not spelled out in the early Reuters account of the vote. The political fact is the trade. Failure to elect anyone would have meant a fourth election in less than two years, in one of the poorer countries in Europe, with a war-crimes judgment still fresh. Success means Shiroka Pula, 73, takes a post that has been a source of instability precisely because the threshold is so high. She does not command the army or set the budget. She does hold a veto pen and a representative role that Belgrade, Brussels and Washington read as a signal of who can agree with whom in Pristina.

The next test is whether the Hague amendment is drafted as the demonstrators on Monday demanded, or as a narrower change that still leaves the specialist chambers able to enforce the Thaci judgment. The 81-year combined sentence and the 81-vote majority landed within three weeks of each other. They are not the same number by design. They are the two figures a reader needs to hold at once.