Kosovo PM Albin Kurti wins election amid tensions with Brussels and Washington – POLITICO

“Everything went according to plan,” Kurti said following the election. “We won, and this is confirmation of a good, prosperous and democratic government.”

Previously a province of Serbia, Kosovo declared independence in 2008 following a brutal civil war in the 1990s between Serbs and Albanians in the former Yugoslavia. Self-Determination (VVL) was the first party to have served its full-four year term in government in the capital Pristina, after winning 50.3 percent of votes in 2021.

Now, however, VVL will need to find a coalition partner if it hopes to continue in power — which could prove a challenge, given Kurti’s pro-Albanian nationalism and the need for compromise to break Kosovo’s international isolation.

Not to mention the prime minister’s salty language regarding the opposition, whom he described as “monsters.”

“There has never been more war than against this government,” Kurti said following the election. “With oligarchs who give money without accounting, and with the opposition who make deals even with the devil against our government. Even though they have lost again, they will remain an opposition, because they do not want the best for either the state or the people.”

Since 2021, Kurti has pressed the ethnic Serb community in Kosovo’s north, which numbers up to 50,000 people out of Kosovo’s 1.6 million population, to accept Pristina’s authority. That has included shutting down Serbian banks and parallel governance institutions in the enclave and forcing Serbs to put Kosovar license plates on their vehicles.