Kosovo elects Justina Shiroka-Pula president with 81 votes, minutes past midnight

The Assembly of Kosovo elected Justina Shiroka-Pula president late on Tuesday with 81 votes, in a session that finished minutes after the constitutional deadline of midnight on 7 October. She accepted the office in the chamber, saying she took the duty with honour and full responsibility. The vote ended a deadlock that had threatened to send the country to a fourth election in less than two years.

Shiroka-Pula, born in Pristina in 1953, is an economist. She graduated from the University of Pristina in 1976 and completed further study in the theory and politics of development economics at the University of Zagreb in 1984. She has served as minister of energy and mining and as a member of the Assembly. On 19 December 2025 the assembly of the Kosova Academy of Sciences and Arts elected her its president, the first woman to hold that post since the academy was founded in 1975. She leaves that office on taking the presidency. Acting president Albulena Haxhiu preceded her. Prime Minister Albin Kurti remains in place.

The arithmetic in the chamber was the story as much as the name. Kosovo's constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the first two rounds of a presidential vote, and a simple majority of all deputies in a third round. Eighty-one votes clears a simple majority of the 120-seat Kuvendi and, depending on attendance, can also clear the higher bar. Bloomberg reported that Kurti and the largest opposition party reached a last-minute agreement that both limited the powers of the war-crimes court and installed Shiroka-Pula as a compromise candidate. A2 CNN in Tirana reported that Bedri Hamza, leader of the Democratic Party of Kosovo, accepted the Vetëvendosje nominee and put forward Eliza Hoxha as a counter-candidate. Hoxha did not prevail.

The court in question is the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, the Hague-based tribunal that tries alleged crimes by Kosovo Liberation Army figures during and after the 1998-99 war. Deputies voted the same day on amendments to the law governing those chambers. Kurti had made a presidential deal the condition for opening that vote. Celebrations followed in Skanderbeg Square in Pristina. The content of the amendments, and whether they cut jurisdiction, alter witness rules, or change the relationship between the Kuvendi and the court, will decide whether the bargain holds with partners in Brussels and The Hague. A vote count of 81 settles the presidency. It does not settle the court's docket.

The deadline itself was not a formality. The Constitutional Court had set midnight on 7 October as the end of the window for electing a president. Haxhiu's acting presidency had already become, in the reading of several Pristina lawyers, de facto irregular: she had held the acting post continuously for more than six months after assuming it on 4 April, past the limit in the third paragraph of Article 90. Had the chamber missed the midnight mark entirely, the next step was another election, the fourth in under two years. Finishing minutes after midnight leaves a procedural argument for anyone who wants one. The parties treated the result as valid. Justina Pula's Wikipedia entry, updated overnight, lists her as incumbent from 7 October 2026.

The opposition's acceptance of an academy president, rather than a party leader, is the political price of the bargain. Shiroka-Pula was floated by the PDK as a possible candidate as early as 4 March. She is not Kurti's factional heir. She is 72 or 73, a technocrat with an energy brief in her past and a scientific institution in her present. That profile lowers the cost for parties that would not hand the presidency to a Vetëvendosje cadre. It also means the office, which in Kosovo is more than ceremonial when government formation stalls, now sits with someone whose last elected mandate was inside the academy, not the party.

For Serbia and for the European Union, the specialist-chambers vote is the clause that will be read first. The tribunal was the condition of a particular phase of Kosovo's external relationships. Narrowing it, if that is what the amendments do, will be tested in Brussels before it is tested in Pristina. The 81-vote presidency removes one crisis, the missing head of state, and opens another, the status of a court several parties have wanted to cut back for years.

Shiroka-Pula's first public line was institutional, not programmatic. She did not, in the remarks reported from the chamber, set out a position on the dialogue with Belgrade or on the amendments just passed. The open question on Wednesday morning is whether the midnight result is accepted by the Constitutional Court if it is challenged, and what the specialist-chambers amendments actually change in the statute. The vote count is public. The legal text is the next document that matters.