Sunday April 4th 2021
Re-election averted
38-year-old elected President of Kosovo
In the second attempt, the parliament of Kosovo elects the young lawyer Vjosa Osmani as president. She has been in office on a commission basis for months. But the opposition and the Serbian minority wanted to prevent their confirmation.
In Kosovo, the 38-year-old lawyer Vjosa Osmani has been elected as the new president. With 71 votes from the 82 MPs present in Pristina, the 38-year-old won the election, said Parliament President Glauk Konjufca. On Saturday, the election failed due to the boycott of the opposition and the Serb minority; if it failed again, early elections would have been threatened again. The failure at the first attempt was a setback for the new Kosovar head of government Albin Kurti.
After her election, Osmani, who was also trained in the USA, called for a dialogue with Serbia in order to normalize relations between the two sides.
Osmani had been provisionally in office since November because her predecessor Hashim Thaci resigned on charges brought by the Kosovo war crimes tribunal in The Hague. The mandate for them had expired with the takeover of the new government around Prime Minister Kurti and his anti-establishment party Vetevendosje. Vetevendosje had clearly won the parliamentary elections in mid-February.
Opposition parties and representatives of civil society criticized the election of Osmani and said that in a fragile democracy like the one in Kosovo, it is not good if the president, prime minister and parliamentary president come from the same party. Osmani is not a member of the Vetevendosje, but was on their list in the election in February.
Kosovo, with its 1.9 million inhabitants, declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, which Russia-backed Serbia does not recognize. Behind the scenes, the European Union in particular is pushing for the conflict to be resolved and is pumping billions into the region. All Western Balkan states are viewed as candidate countries for EU membership. Kosovo is considered to be the poorest country in the region.
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