Kosovo’s election of a new president has brought an end to heightened tensions in parliament and possibly on the streets. On Tuesday, protests against the convictions of former Kosovo Liberation Army leaders coincided with a midnight deadline to elect a president. Ultimately, the ruling Vetevendosje Movement (LVV) and opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) reached an agreement on her candidacy, clearing the way for a parliamentary vote.
Lawmakers elected Justina Shiroka Pula to the country’s top office in the first minutes of Wednesday, close to the constitutional deadline, averting new early parliamentary elections that could have pushed the country into a deeper crisis. The 81 votes she secured – one more than the two-thirds, 80-vote threshold required – were the result of a pragmatic compromise. The parties also agreed to adopt amendments changing the legal framework governing the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, the Hague-based court established to try former Kosovo Liberation Army leaders for alleged war crimes – an issue demonstrators had been urging politicians to address.
After a prolonged period of political deadlock, none of Kosovo’s political parties appeared willing to take responsibility for triggering another election. Kosovo had already been in a prolonged political limbo, she said, with election fatigue and increasing public dissatisfaction with the political elite. After the Specialist Chambers verdict and 20 days of protests, including violent incidents in Pristina on the night before the presidential vote, “going into yet another election would have carried a high political cost for everyone,” Emini said.
The 73-year-old is the country’s third female president, after Atifete Jahjaga and Vjosa Osmani. Born in Pristina in 1953, Shiroka Pula brings to the presidency a career spanning academia, public institutions and politics. After graduating from the University of Pristina’s economics faculty, she completed postgraduate studies in the theory and policy of economic development at the Faculty of Economics in Zagreb, then in Yugoslavia.
She later earned a doctorate, researching the relationship between demographic investment and Kosovo’s economic development. After a brief period working at the National Bank of Kosovo, Shiroka Pula began a long academic career back at the University of Pristina, rising from assistant lecturer to professor and heading the department of management and informatics. Last December, she became the first woman to be elected head of the Kosovo Academy of Sciences and Arts, known by its Albanian acronym ASHAK.
Her path to the presidency, however, has not been solely academic. Shiroka Pula served as Kosovo’s minister of energy and mining from 2008 to 2011. She was then a PDK member of parliament from 2011 to 2014.
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