Kosovo elects Justina Shiroka Pula as president before deadline

Kosovo lawmakers elected Justina Shiroka Pula as president just before a snap election deadline. The vote eased a long deadlock but coincided with a curb on the Hague war crimes court.Pristina,Oct 7, 2026 13:24 ISTKosovo lawmakers late on Tuesday elected economist and academic Justina Shiroka Pula as the country’s new president, minutes before a constitutional deadline that would have forced a snap election. The vote came during a marathon parliamentary session and marked a key moment in a political crisis that has led to legislative deadlock for more than 19 months and two early parliamentary elections.In the same extraordinary session, lawmakers also approved a law limiting the powers of a special court in The Hague in the Netherlands that was set up to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, during Kosovo’s 1998-99 war for independence from Serbia. Outside Parliament, thousands of protesters had gathered to demand that the legislature pass the measure.Shiroka Pula secured 81 votes in the 120-seat parliament. She recently served as president of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo and will become Kosovo’s third female president since the country’s post-war independence. She emerged as a last-minute consensus candidate backed by the ruling Self-Determination movement and the largest opposition party, the Democratic Party of Kosovo.The role of president in Kosovo is largely ceremonial, though the office also has an important role in foreign policy and the president serves as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Shiroka Pula will have to endorse the law limiting the power of the Hague court for it to become binding. After taking the oath late on Tuesday, Shiroka Pula said: "Today, I accept with great honour and full responsibility the duty of President of the Republic of Kosovo." She added, "This mandate does not belong to one person alone, it belongs to our citizens, our institutions, and the state for which many generations have sacrificed."Her election came after more than two weeks of protests following a verdict by the Hague-based court convicting four of Kosovo’s wartime rebel leaders of war crimes, including former president Hashim Thaci. They were sentenced to between 13 and 25 years in prison. Kosovo has criticised the verdicts as unjust, saying the KLA, which Thaci had led before entering politics, had fought against Serbian oppression. Residents and politicians have feared that the court ruling would tarnish Kosovo’s struggle for independence.More than 13,000 people, mostly ethnic Albanians, were killed during the conflict in Kosovo, while about 1 million ethnic Albanian Kosovars were driven from their homes during the fighting. Against that backdrop, Shiroka Pula’s election and Parliament’s vote on the Hague court law marked a significant development in Kosovo’s prolonged political crisis.With PTI Inputs- Ends