Kosovo's acting presidency passes the six-month limit in Article 90

Kosovo has crossed the six-month limit on an acting presidency without electing a head of state. Albulena Haxhiu, speaker of the Assembly, has held the acting office since 4 April, the day President Vjosa Osmani's five-year mandate ended. Article 90, paragraph 3, of the constitution says the acting presidency cannot run longer than six months. Legal analysts, including Vullnet Bugaqku of the Kosovo Democratic Institute, have said that limit fell on 4 October. From 5 October, on that reading, the same person has no constitutional right to keep exercising the office.

The Assembly's own election clock is almost as tight. The body was constituted on 6 August. Eugen Cakolli has calculated that the 60-day period for electing a president then runs to 5 October. The Constitutional Court has treated the failure to elect as a deadline with consequences, and local reporting on Monday said two days remained on the court's clock for the presidential vote, with the Kuvendi also due to sit on amendments to the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. The two clocks, acting-president and Assembly election, were always going to collide. They now have.

Haxhiu was re-elected speaker on 9 September. The presidency has said she would keep the acting role until a successor is chosen. Members of her party, Vetëvendosje, had earlier suggested that a newly elected speaker could start a fresh six-month acting term. Bugaqku and other lawyers told Radio Free Europe that the constitution does not work that way. The six months attach to the vacancy, not to each new speaker. A second speaker does not reset Article 90.

The practical gap is what happens to decrees, appointments and the representation of the state abroad if the acting office is vacant in law and occupied in fact. Kosovo's constitution assigns the acting role to the speaker when the presidency is empty. It does not spell out a caretaker after the six months expire. That silence is the uncertainty officials in Pristina are now inside. A law passed by the Assembly can still be signed only by someone the constitution recognises as entitled to sign it. If Haxhiu signs after 4 October, a later court can be asked whether the signature was valid. If nobody signs, the statute sits.

The Specialist Chambers amendment is the nearest live text. The Kuvendi is due to consider changes to the court that tries former Kosovo Liberation Army figures. A presidential signature, or the lack of one, matters to the calendar of that bill. So does the two-day remainder on the court's election deadline. Missing it does not dissolve the Assembly by itself. It does hand the deadlock back to the Constitutional Court, which has already been the referee of this year's failed attempts to fill the office.

Osmani's mandate ended in April. Six months later the parties have not assembled the votes a president needs. Vetëvendosje holds the speaker's chair and the acting office. It does not, on the recorded votes, hold a presidential majority. The opposition has no agreed candidate who does either. Article 90 was written for a short handover. It is now the clause everyone is reading, because the handover did not happen.

Foreign representation is the quiet casualty. Ambassadors present credentials to a president. A visit that needs a head-of-state signature waits. Kosovo's partners have spent the year addressing an acting office they expected to be temporary. From 5 October they are addressing an office whose own lawyers disagree about whether it still exists. The Assembly can end that disagreement with a vote. It has not found the votes. The court can end it with a ruling. It has already set the deadline the Kuvendi is now against.