The failure to reach a consensus for a unifying figure like the President, among other things, shows us that the inter-party trust is almost zero, that the culture of compromise is missing and that the institutions of the state are perceived not as common political spaces that have the public interest as their final goal, but as means of domination and blackmail for the “maintenance” of power. Whereas the inter-party dialogue is seen simply as an electoral calculation, and not as a value of the “ethics of discourse” that produces legitimacy
The ambition or intention of the VV to gamble, or on the public “Bed of Procrusteus”, its political capital with 66 deputies, due to the failure to find a compromise for the election of the President of the country, are now significantly more real and more likely to lead the country to new elections.
It can also be said that this next failure in the talks with the two opposition entities is not just a numerical crisis in the Assembly, but also a deep crisis of our political culture and mentality, which proves the lack of responsibility to find adequate solutions for the artificially created situations in the still fragile Kosovar democracy. This fact, however, also proves the lack of sense, or the lack of sense of the transition process to finally “divorce” from the logic of conflict and image between the current leaders. In this regard, the failure also “delegates” us a very clear message: that the Ahtisaarian procedural democracy that Kosovo has been building for almost three decades has become a tight “shirt” against the level of our political emancipation.
In the sociological judgment, here we are dealing with two approaches or two diametrically opposed attitudes: one has to do with the unwavering insistence to advocate and implement the “standards” of formal procedural democracy (where the opposition parties are mainly identified), while the other is trying to impose the VV through the “standards of a third Republic”, or a new normative democracy. From this point of view, it is clear that we are dealing with tough “battles” to radically change the narrative on the state and democracy of Kosovo. And in all this “odyssey”, I also see another trend: that of the missing ideological “battles”, which for our transitory democracy also seems healthy, in the sense of the ideological realignment or reset of the main parties. I say so, because throughout the post-war period we only formally had parties with ideological orientations, without clear profiles. Now, the economic and geopolitical crisis are very likely to force the existing parties into transformative obligations and into new competitive narratives, if they wish to remain in the Kosovar political market. If the opposite happens, I am very convinced that the circumstances that are “knocking” in new developments will “produce” new subjects and leaders.
Another fact, which very few analysts associate with Kurti’s insistence, has to do with the new geopolitical challenges that Kosovo, due to the agreements it has made, must face. Not forgetting here the compromise that Prime Minister Kurti himself has made with the act of accepting the agreement with Serbia for a “self-management” of the northern Serbs, which, hand on heart, is a harmful compromise for Kosovo. Because “self-management”, de facto, is a “Republika Srpska” in Kosovo.
So, when all these facts are collected, we understand that the failure to reach a consensus for a unifying figure like the President, among other things, shows us that the inter-party trust is almost zero, that the culture of compromise is missing and that the state institutions are not perceived as common political spaces that have the public interest as their final goal, but as means of domination and blackmail for the “maintenance” of power. Whereas the inter-party dialogue is seen simply as an electoral calculation, and not as a value of the “ethics of discourse” that produces legitimacy.
The failure should also be seen as a consequence of the lack of installation of a democratic principle and norm, where leaders must behave in accordance with the rules and the political “game” that they have accepted in advance. These principles, when not respected by political entities, lead citizens to lose faith in the vote as an instrument of change and to increase their political indifference towards repeated events, as happened with the stalemate of last year, but also with the recent one regarding the (non)election of the President.
