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

Kosovo has a new president, elected with one vote to spare and a few minutes past a constitutional midnight. Justina Shiroka Pula took 81 votes in the 120-seat Kuvendi in the early minutes of Wednesday 7 October. She needed 80. Failure would have dissolved parliament and sent the country to a snap election, the fourth in less than two years.

The secret ballot opened six minutes before midnight on Tuesday, Radio Free Europe reported, and the count finished after the deadline had passed. AFP and Reuters both treated the result as valid and as the act that avoided dissolution. She was sworn in the same sitting.

The deal that unlocked the chair

The vote did not arrive on its own. It followed a bargain between Prime Minister Albin Kurti's Vetevendosje and the opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo, led by Bedri Hamza. Immediately before the presidential ballot, parliament passed amendments to the law on the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, the Hague court that tries crimes from the 1998-99 war. The second reading drew 88 votes.

RFE/RL described the amendments as limiting the court's decisions. Reuters described the deal as one to limit the court's powers. Critics of the chambers have argued that its sentences are too heavy. The concrete recent sentence is not in dispute: on 16 September the court gave former president Hashim Thaci and three others a combined 81 years for war crimes tied to the break from Serbia. The amendments do not erase that judgment. They change the rules under which later decisions will be taken, and they were the price of PDK's votes for a president.

Kurti proposed Shiroka Pula late on Tuesday. Hamza accepted her and put up Eliza Hoxha as the opposing candidate. The first-round bar is two-thirds, which is why 80 was the line and 81 was enough. A ceremonial office has repeatedly broken Kosovan parliaments for exactly this reason. Parties can govern with less than 80. They cannot fill the presidency without a cross-party deal.

Who she is

Shiroka Pula was born in 1953. She is an economics professor and the first woman to lead the Kosovo Academy of Sciences and Arts. She was minister for energy and mining, described in some reports as economy minister, from 2008 to 2011, and a PDK member of parliament from 2011 to 2014. The candidacy is a compromise in both directions: a figure from the academy, with a PDK past, proposed by a Vetevendosje prime minister.

After the vote she said the mandate does not belong to one person, and that it belongs to citizens, institutions, and the state. Reuters carried the shorter line that she would be the president of all citizens. The office itself remains largely ceremonial. Its practical power, in recent cycles, has been the power to trigger an election by staying empty.

What the clock was counting

Kosovo's constitution sets a deadline for electing a president once the procedure starts. Missing it dissolves the assembly. That is what happened in June, and it is why Wednesday's sitting was held at all. The procedure began on 6 October. Lawmakers were still voting in the first minutes of 7 October. Gulf News, citing AFP, and Kosovo Online both recorded that the count finished minutes after midnight.

The political cost of another snap vote was the lever. Kurti and Hamza had spent the day deadlocked. The specialist-chambers amendments were the item PDK wanted. The presidency was the item Vetevendosje needed. Putting the court vote first, with 88 in favour, and the presidential vote second, with 81, is the sequence that closed both files in one night.

The Hague court is not a domestic tribunal. It was set up to hear cases the Kosovan system was judged unable to try, and its defendants include former Kosovo Liberation Army figures who remain central to PDK's history. A parliamentary majority that trims its reach, eight months after an 81-year combined sentence on Thaci and three others, will be read in The Hague and in Brussels as a political act, whatever the legal form of the amendments. The text of those amendments is the next document that matters. The vote totals are already public: 88 on the court law, 81 on the president, against a bar of 80 in a 120-seat house.

Shiroka Pula takes a ceremonial office at 72 or 73, depending on the month of her 1953 birth, with a majority of one. The alternative on the table at 23:54 on Tuesday was another election. That alternative is now closed, unless the amendments or the timing of the count are challenged. No such challenge had been filed in the reports of Wednesday morning.