Parliamentary election
Kurti remains in power in Kosovo
Prime Minister Albin Kurti has declared himself the winner after the parliamentary elections in Kosovo. "We have won and we will form the next government," he told supporters in the capital Prishtina shortly after midnight.
According to the election observer group Democracy in Action, which relied on the results from 98 percent of polling stations, Kurti's party Vetevendosje (Self-Determination) received 40.4 percent of the vote. It has thus lost its absolute majority.
In the election four years ago, Kurti's left-wing nationalist formation had won 50.3 percent of the vote and thus came to power for the first time. According to Democracy in Action, this time the liberal Democratic Party (PDK) received 21.7 percent of the vote, the bourgeois Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) 17.5 percent and the conservative Alliance for the Future (AAK) 7.2 percent.
Around two million citizens were called to vote. Kosovo is a potential candidate for EU membership. For the first time since 2010, a parliament in the country has completed its four-year mandate. Kosovo used to be a Serbian province. After the Kosovo War of 1998/99, in which NATO intervened on the side of the Kosovo Albanians against Belgrade, years followed under UN administration and the declaration of independence in 2008. Negotiations on the status of Kosovo with Serbia had previously failed to produce any results.
Problems with the vote count
Other parties and alliances are likely to have failed at the five-percent hurdle that decides who gets into the parliament. Regardless of this, 20 of the 120 seats are reserved for ethnic minority groups: Ten to Serbs and a further ten to others, including Bosniaks, Turks and Roma.
Kurti is pursuing a strict course against the Serbian minority in the south-east European country, which mainly lives in the north of the country. His declared aim is to dismantle state "parallel structures" that are supported by the government in neighboring Serbia. Belgrade still does not recognize Kosovo's independence.
Serbia has not yet accepted Kosovo's independence. Five of the 27 EU states - Spain, Romania, Slovakia, Greece and Cyprus - have also not yet recognized Kosovo as an independent state. There are also still unresolved conflicts with the Kosovo Serbs, who make up around five to six percent of the population. All other states that became independent as a result of the wars during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, such as Slovenia and Croatia, were constituent republics, not provinces as in the case of Kosovo.
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