Kosovo elects Justina Shiroka Pula with 81 votes, one above the line

Kosovo's parliament elected Justina Shiroka Pula as president in the first minutes of Wednesday, with 81 votes in a 120-seat chamber. She needed 80, a two-thirds majority. The constitutional clock ran out at midnight. Missing it would have dissolved the assembly and sent the country to another snap election, as happened in June. She cleared the line by one vote.

Shiroka Pula is 73, born in Pristina in 1953. She is president of the Kosovo Academy of Sciences and Arts, an economics professor, and a former economy minister, in office from 2008 to 2011. She is the third woman to hold the presidency, after Atifete Jahjaga and Vjosa Osmani. The post is largely ceremonial. It has still been a repeated source of collapse, because the two-thirds rule forces parties that do not share a government to agree on a name.

The deal under the vote

The 81 votes were the product of an agreement between Prime Minister Albin Kurti's Vetevendosje and the opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo. Alongside her candidacy, the parties agreed to amend the legal frame of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, the Hague court set up to try former Kosovo Liberation Army leaders. Protests against convictions of those leaders were under way in Pristina as the deadline approached. The court amendment was the price of the presidential arithmetic.

That trade is the part of the night with consequences beyond the palace. The Specialist Chambers were created, with international backing, precisely because domestic courts were not trusted with these cases. A change to their legal frame, negotiated in the hours before a presidential deadline, will be read in The Hague and in allied capitals as a political intervention in a court Kosovo had agreed to host at arm's length. The text of the amendments was not the document the 81 deputies were electing. It is the document their bargain now requires.

What she said, and what the office can do

After the vote Shiroka Pula said the mandate does not belong to one person, that it belongs to citizens, and that she will be the president of all of them. The line is standard. The constraint is not. A ceremonial president signs laws, represents the state, and can return a bill once. She does not command the security forces and she does not set the budget. The instability of the office has come from the election rule, not from the powers. June's snap vote was triggered by a failure to elect a predecessor in time. Wednesday's one-vote margin shows how close the country came to repeating that.

Kurti remains prime minister. His party needed PDK votes it does not have on ordinary legislation. A bargain limited to the court and the presidency does not give him a stable majority for the budget or for talks with Serbia. Those talks are the other file on the desk. Serbia does not recognise Kosovo. The European Union has tied parts of both sides' path to a normalisation deal that is stalled. A new president does not restart that file. She does remove one domestic deadline that was about to wipe out the assembly.

The one-vote margin

Eighty votes were required. Eighty-one were cast for her. In a chamber of 120, that means 39 deputies did not back the only candidate who could stop another election. The protest outside, focused on the Hague convictions, and the deal inside, focused on the court's statute, are the same argument conducted in two places. Shiroka Pula's biography, academic and ministerial rather than wartime, made her a name both parties could accept. Whether she will sign the court amendments, or send them back once, is the first use of the limited power the constitution actually gives her.