Elections will be held on Sunday. This may be the first time that voter turnout in Kosovo elections is not in question — thanks to the government in Pristina and its local deputies.
The biggest driver of high turnout will likely be what we’ve witnessed in the north over the past few months: frantic municipal inspectors, sanitation officers, construction supervisors, and other emissaries of the punitive expedition known as the Municipality of North Mitrovica. They punish at will, shut down shops and clinics, paint over buildings, rename streets, and rearrange paving stones — all without logic, order, or necessity.
Aware that this may be their last chance, we watch as they, in a delirium of ethnic hatred, forcibly impose their will on the Serbs in the north. They seem like people running out of time — restless, sleepless, aggressive — feverishly trying to make everything irreversible before they themselves become irrelevant. It’s painful to watch, even harder to live through, but not difficult to understand: they have gained very little from it.
Three years ago, Kosovo Albanians, likely to their own surprise, were gifted control over the northern municipalities, the police, the courts — and a white flag from Belgrade. It was as if Kurti had caught a golden fish and wished for three things from Belgrade:
“Hand over the institutions, organize Banjska, and withdraw from the police.” And he got them all — on a silver platter. We won’t delve into the amateurish vision of the Serbian political marionettes who made this possible, but here we are. They were handed what they could never have dreamed of — power in northern Kosovo.
At that moment, Albin Kurti and the Kosovo Albanians had two options. The first was to make good use of this gift — to show what responsible governance in the interest of all citizens looks like; to build the multiethnic society they publicly claim to support; to apply the law consistently and equally — in short, to demonstrate a genuine commitment to shared life and the values they say come with integration into Kosovo’s society. But they chose not to. Instead, they opted for the second path: a violent, spiteful, vengeful populism driven from Pristina — a policy that turns its own citizens into enemies, mocks their national symbols, criminalizes their identity, humiliates them, and subjugates them through force and intimidation.
And the real question is — what have they actually gained from this? The blinding zeal of revenge and crude populism may, for now, obscure the effects and reach of such a policy. But logic and analysis point to something entirely different: they have gained several Nothings.
First, ethno-national populism — the sole pillar of Albin Kurti’s political platform — did not bring him an electoral majority. That’s the first NOTHING. That policy no longer commands majority support in Kosovo. His victories have been spent, and Kurti now clings to power only through cunning legal manipulations, which, after some fifty failed attempts to convene the Assembly and eight months after elections, still allow him to govern in a “technical” mandate.
The day Kurti receives a new mandate to form a government, it will become clear that he lacks the majority for his politics and will have to relinquish power. He might still hold it in a society where people don’t need to eat, work, or earn a living — where life can be sustained on the spectacle of posturing in North Mitrovica alone. Fortunately, that’s not the case.
Second, he has lost the sympathy of the international community. The diplomatic West — a euphemism for NATO-oriented Western countries that for years favored Pristina — no longer views this conflict through the same lens. Increasingly, it sees the fault in Pristina itself and is now acting, more often than not, as an advocate for Serbian interests.
True, the automatism of Western policy does not allow for drastic turns in their stance toward Kosovo, so the reproaches we hear from diplomats may sound mild, confused, even irritating. But behind that clumsy façade of baffled diplomats, a tectonic shift is taking place.
As a direct consequence of this government’s policies, the international community now increasingly perceives Kosovo’s current trajectory as a deviation from its own strategic interests. This will inevitably lead to growing international isolation for Kosovo and mounting external pressures of various kinds.
Albin Kurti has managed to convince the international community that Kosovo’s Serbs can only survive and live with strong, untouchable autonomy. And this is no longer taboo — it has become consensus.
What does that mean in practice? The international community now sees the situation in the north as unsustainable — and so discussions will soon reopen on everything Kurti now parades as great national victories: the institutions, banks, police, and courts. There’s your second NOTHING.
And third — perhaps most importantly — if there were once among the Serbs some liberal-minded people who believed coexistence was possible, who hoped that Pristina would respect and treat them as equals, they are gone now. Those illusions have been shattered by the very example of what life for Serbs in Kosovo would look like if it were entirely in the hands of Kosovo Albanians.
An open-air prison, where wearing a T-shirt with a religious motif, flying a flag at a wedding, or whistling at a politician can be treated as a crime. The “Third Republic” Kurti invokes is a place where Serbs are not welcome.
Paradoxically, it has managed to unite all Kosovo Serb political camps — democrats and nationalists, fan groups and civil society, the Serb List and students — around one idea: the only way for Serbs to remain in Kosovo is to decide their own fate.
To sum up, this experiment of Albin Kurti’s, now nearing its end, has shown that the systematic destruction of life in the north was not enough to secure him power; that despite it all, most Albanians no longer want him in office; that he has lost the support of the international community — which now advocates autonomy for Kosovo’s Serbs more openly than Belgrade itself (though that’s not a high bar); and, finally, that he has united the Serbs in their determination to resist his vision of Kosovo.
The first step in that direction comes this Sunday. So don’t hesitate, don’t be complacent — go out and vote according to your conscience, without fear or doubt.
