Written by: Adri Nurellari
Kosovo is once again facing the same manipulative political model of Albin Kurti, who has used crisis-making as a technique of power because he has regularly used it as a tool to maintain and expand his rule. Wanting to control the electoral calendar, last year he organized several parliamentary sessions and legally contested decisions, with the full knowledge that the cases would end up in the Constitutional Court. The goal this year was to buy time and postpone the elections. He succeeded, they were dragged out and finally brought forward on December 28 when it was most convenient for him.
The scheme is now easily readable even for yesterday's actions. A procedural conflict is created, a legal clash occurs, the case is transferred to the Constitutional Court, time is consumed and the electoral calendar is moved later than June 7, when the elections should have been held. Thus, we are witnessing the reappearance of the same manipulative mechanism, taking steps with predictable constitutional costs, pushing the opposition towards a legal appeal and introducing the process into another cycle of delays. The practical effect is to move the elections to a period more favorable to the electoral interest of Kurti's personal power.
As former President Vjosa Osmani has also self-reported, the election date is not at all a neutral administrative issue but an electoral manipulation scheme. The carefully selected date determines the level of participation and the structure of the voting body. In the summer period, starting in July, the diaspora enters Kosovo en masse, while many resident citizens leave for vacations or family visits abroad (starting in mid-June when their children's vacations begin).
This changes the relative weight of electoral segments and creates new political terrain, as was seen in the difference between the February 9 elections and those of December 28, when Kurti deepened the result. Even more so when the difference between the electorates is clear, about 40% support from permanent residents and 60% from the diaspora, i.e. over 20% difference. Also, the exit poll by UBO Consulting showed that 4.5% of those who voted in Kosovo on February 9, 2025 had come from the diaspora, while on December 28, expatriates accounted for 15,5% of the respondents. Permanent residents seek concrete results, functional services and are tired of crises, failures and scandals, while the diaspora often feeds more on identity-based and dogmatic rhetoric and tends to support populist figures, a phenomenon also known in the region where the external vote has often favored leaders such as Orban, Vučić, Tuđman or Gruevski.
So, setting the date is a deliberate electoral engineering that constitutes a new level of degradation of political standards and democratic culture. Scholars often mention that the most dishonest, cynical and vulgar form of exercising power is the use of institutions not to govern, but to manipulate the circumstances of the competition with the aim of maintaining and increasing control. Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of the book “How Democracies Die”, emphasize that “modern democracies rarely fall with tanks; they are gradually damaged by elected leaders who erode institutions from within”. Francis Fukuyama, on the other hand, has warned that political decline begins when institutions cease to serve the public interest and are captured by personal or party interests. When the administration, parliament, presidency and constitutional rhythm are treated as tactical tools, the state begins to weaken significantly from within, although it continues to maintain the formal appearance of normality. This is precisely the danger when procedures are used as political weapons and the state is put at the service of one person.
And here, in particular, the essence of the Kurti phenomenon is revealed, the gradual slide towards the lowest level of politics. A man who sought power by promising new standards and is ending up using the oldest tricks of the Balkans. He came to power 7 years ago as an anti-system leader while ending up as its most common copy. The most poignant irony of Kosovar politics is that the man who on September 29, 2018 mobilized the crowds with the cry "A people is not subject to a man" against Thaçi, has today become the very man who demands the submission of institutions to his will. Albin Kurti once fought the cult of the individual, today he is feeding it.
The most absurd thing is that Kurti now has enormous power, like neither Thaçi nor Rugova ever had. He has positions, votes, control, influence and political capital like no other political leader since the Tito era. But he seems to not know what to do with them, except to demand even more. Instead of turning this power into reforms, economic development and state strengthening; his entire obsession seems to be only the expansion of political hegemony. Power is treated as an end in itself, not as an instrument for actions. So Kurti demands more power for the sake of power, without vision, without project and without result.
Therefore, it is sad to see Kosovo reduced to this level. A country that has paid so dearly for freedom, independence, democracy and pluralism does not deserve to be reduced to a scene of procedural maneuvers, electoral calculations and one man's thirst for dominance. History has taught us that regimes that place themselves above the law and national interest sooner or later collapse under the weight of their own mistakes. But the question that remains is: how much will this people pay until they understand that freedom in 1999 was not won to replace it with another form of subjugation?
t7 live
