Kosovo has until 6 October to elect a president or face another election

Kosovo's parliament has until 6 October to elect a president. The Constitutional Court set that date in a ruling published on 23 September, after the opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo asked it to look at delays in constituting the assembly. The court said the 60-day clock for a presidential election started on 8 August and runs out on 6 October. If no president is chosen, a new parliamentary election must be called within 45 days. That vote would be the fourth in two years.

Albulena Haxhiu, speaker of the assembly and a Vetëvendosje figure, has been acting president since Vjosa Osmani's five-year term ended on 4 April. Article 90, paragraph 3, of the constitution limits an acting president to six months. Vullnet Bugaqku of the Democratic Institute of Kosovo told Radio Free Europe that Haxhiu's acting mandate ends on 4 October and that the same person cannot continue in the role past that point. Other counts, including the current-events summary drawn from Kosovo Online, treat 4 April plus six months as a breach that is already in effect by 5 October. The court deadline for an election of a full president is the later date, 6 October. The two clocks are related and not identical.

The candidate who has not been voted on

In late August, Vetëvendosje leader Albin Kurti and Democratic League of Kosovo leader Lumir Abdixhiku agreed on Bekim Sejdiu, a former Constitutional Court judge and diplomat, for the presidency. The agreement has not produced a successful vote. Electing a president needs a supermajority that the government parties have not assembled on the floor. The court rejected the PDK request to halt parliament and to declare the government vote unlawful, so the assembly keeps sitting while the presidential clock runs.

The Kuvendi is also due to take up amendments linked to the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, the Hague-based court trying former Kosovo Liberation Army figures. That session is the other item on a calendar now dominated by the presidential deadline. Opposition parties have said Vetëvendosje may prefer a later election, when diaspora voters who have backed Kurti are home for the holidays. A court-ordered vote inside 45 days would land in November, not December. Kosovarja, reading the court's window, put the last Sunday inside the deadline at 15 November.

What a missed deadline does

A missed 6 October vote does not leave Haxhiu as president by default. The constitution's six-month cap on an acting head of state, and the court's order of a new election, point the other way. Who signs laws and decrees in the gap is the practical problem Bugaqku flagged: once the acting term is over, the same speaker does not have a clean claim to the office. Parliament can still elect a president on 6 October and stop the sequence. It has not done so in the weeks since Sejdiu's name was agreed.

Osmani left office on 4 April with no successor in place. The months since have been spent on government formation, on the speakership, and on a presidential bargain that stalled. The Specialist Chambers amendment is the legislative work waiting behind that stall. Foreign governments that deal with Pristina have had an acting head of state for half a year. After 6 October they may have a new election date instead of a president.

The number that matters

The number is two days, then 45. Two days for a floor vote that needs more than the governing parties have so far delivered. Forty-five days from a failed vote to an election that Kurti's opponents wanted to push toward the December diaspora and that the court calendar pulls forward. Sejdiu remains the named compromise. He is not president until the Kuvendi says so, in a vote it has not held.