Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s leftwing party won most seats in the weekend parliamentary election but was left without a majority in the house, forcing it to look for an ally to form the next government, according to preliminary results released Monday.
The vote on Sunday was key in determining who will lead Kosovo as talks on normalizing ties with rival Serbia remain stalled and foreign funding for one of Europe’s poorest countries is in question.
The election marked the first time since independence in 2008 that Kosovo’s parliament completed a full four-year mandate. It was the ninth parliamentary vote in Kosovo since the end of the 1998-1999 war between Serbian government forces and ethnic Albanian separatists that pushed Serbian forces out following a 78-day NATO air campaign.
Serbia does not recognize Kosovo’s independence.
With 88% of the votes counted, Kurti’s Self-Determination Movement Party, or Vetevendosje!, had won 41.3%, according to the Central Election Commission, the election governing body.
The Democratic Party of Kosovo, or PDK, whose main leaders are detained at a Netherlands-based international criminal tribunal in The Hague and accused of war crimes, won 21.8% of the vote.
Next, with 17.8% support is the Democratic League of Kosovo, or LDK, the oldest party in the country. The LDK lost much of its support after the death in 2006 of its leader, Ibrahim Rugova. The Alliance for Kosovo’s Future of former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj garnered 7.7% of the votes.
Still, Kurti was upbeat, though his remarks gave nothing away about who he plans to ask to join his coalition government.
“The people won. Vetevendosje! won. We are the winners who will form the next Cabinet,” Kurti told journalists as his supporters took to the streets to celebrate.
The commission’s webpage was down temporarily on Sunday as it was overloaded “due to the citizens’ high interest to learn the results,” election body said. Results were collected manually.
A preliminary turnout after 92% of the votes counted was 40.6% — about 7% lower than four years ago.
The new 120-seat parliament reserves 20 seats for minorities regardless of election results, 10 of them for the Serb minority.
Kurti’s new term will face multiple challenges after Washington recently announced it was freezing foreign aid and the European Union, almost two years ago, suspended funding for some projects and initiatives. He also is under pressure to increase public salaries and pensions, improve education and health services, and fight poverty.
Kosovo, with a population of 1.6 million, is one of the poorest countries in Europe with an annual gross domestic product of less than $6,000 per person.
Kurti also is likely to try and repair ties with Western powers, at odds since his Cabinet took several steps that raised tensions with Serbia and Kosovo’s ethnic Serbs, including the ban on the use of the Serbian currency, the dinar, and dinar transfers to Kosovo’s Serbs.
Kosovo’s ethnic Serb minority depends on Belgrade’s social services and payments.
The United States, the European Union and the NATO-led stabilization force in Kosovo, or KFOR, have urged the government in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, to refrain from unilateral actions, fearing the revival of inter-ethnic conflict.
In Sunday’s election, Srpska Lista, the main party of the ethnic Serb minority, won 2.8% of the vote — just over half of its winnings four years ago.
The party’s leader, Zlatan Elek, said it was “the absolute winner of this election,” and thanked Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic for the “strong support for our people.”
KFOR had increased its presence in Kosovo after last year’s tensions with Serbia, as well as ahead of the election.
A team of 104 observers from the EU, 18 from the Council of Europe and about 1,600 others from international or local organizations, monitored the vote.
