Kosovo’s Endless Election Cycle Collides With the Shadow of Sami Lushtaku
Violence in Skenderaj, involving Sami Lushtaku and members of Albin Kurti’s governing movement, underscores the deepening tensions driving Kosovo toward another destabilising election.
Kosovo moved a step deeper into political instability on Wednesday after violent scenes erupted in Skenderaj, a municipality long associated with the power structures of the country’s former wartime elite, less than a month before the republic heads toward its third parliamentary election in just 16 months1.
According to statements published by the governing Lëvizja Vetëvendosje party, Hysni Mehani, the party’s branch leader in Skenderaj and a deputy minister in the Ministry of Finance, was physically assaulted while drinking coffee with party activists and former deputy Arjeta Fejza at a café in the town centre. The party accused Sami Lushtaku, the mayor of Skenderaj and a senior figure linked to the Democratic Party of Kosovo, known as PDK, together with his bodyguards and associates, of carrying out the attack.
Photographs released by Vetëvendosje appeared to show Mehani bloodied in the face2. The party alleged that he was first struck with fists and later hit in the head with a glass, while Bahri Zabeli, another party official, was also assaulted after attempting to intervene.
Vetëvendosje described the incident as “bandit style violence” and demanded urgent legal action against those responsible.
Lushtaku denied personally assaulting Mehani. In a statement posted later on social media3, he claimed instead that “citizens reacted” after hearing chants and accusations labelling him “Sami Serbia”, language that has become increasingly common in Kosovo’s deeply polarised political climate.
“I have spent my life serving the country,” Lushtaku wrote, adding that such labels would no longer be tolerated by residents of Skenderaj.
The reaction4 from Lidhja Demokratike e Kosovës also signalled growing concern among opposition and centrist political actors that the normalisation of inflammatory rhetoric and physical intimidation is beginning to erode the boundaries of democratic competition in Kosovo. While the party did not directly assign responsibility for the violence in Skenderaj, its statement warned that the spread of hate speech, political threats and what it described as “digital terror” risks creating a climate in which violence becomes increasingly accepted as part of public and political life.
The confrontation comes at a moment of acute institutional paralysis in Kosovo. Early elections have been scheduled for 7 June after repeated failures to stabilise parliament and secure the constitutional processes necessary to maintain government continuity. The vote will mark the third parliamentary election since early 2025, a cycle that has exhausted political institutions and deepened tensions between Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s reformist administration and opposition networks rooted in Kosovo’s post-war political order.
For several years, Kosovo’s political crisis has increasingly unfolded not only inside parliament but also through confrontations in the streets, media campaigns and allegations of intimidation. Few figures symbolise that convergence of wartime legacy, political influence and coercive power more clearly than Sami Lushtaku.
Lushtaku emerged from the Kosovo war as a commander associated with the Drenica operational zone of the Kosovo Liberation Army, an area that later became one of the principal political strongholds of PDK. But over the past decade, his trajectory has also become inseparable from allegations of organised intimidation, violence and institutional capture that have repeatedly surfaced in court proceedings, investigative reporting and international sanctions records5.
In 2015, judges sitting under the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, EULEX, convicted Lushtaku in the Drenica cases and sentenced him to twelve years in prison for wartime crimes connected to the killing of a civilian. The judgment became one of the most politically sensitive rulings in Kosovo’s post-war history, not least because it involved some of the country’s most powerful former guerrilla figures.
The years that followed only reinforced Lushtaku’s reputation as a figure able to navigate, and at times evade, institutional constraint. In 2014, while serving his sentence, he escaped during a hospital transfer to the University Clinical Centre of Kosovo. His wife later pleaded guilty to facilitating the escape and received a suspended custodial sentence converted into a financial penalty.
American authorities have separately placed Lushtaku under sanctions through the United States Treasury Department’s Balkans programme6, where he remains listed. Sanctions are not criminal convictions, but they represent a formal determination by Washington that an individual is linked to activities threatening regional stability or governance.
Investigations published over the past two years by Gunpowder Chronicles have portrayed Lushtaku as operating at the intersection of wartime patronage networks, organised crime allegations and political coercion. Those reports documented allegations surrounding missing wartime funds, accusations by former Kosovo Liberation Army members and lawyers who claimed they were threatened after speaking publicly, and a broader culture of intimidation in Kosovo’s Drenica region.
One of the most prominent of those accounts came from Gazmend Halilaj, a lawyer and former Kosovo Police investigator, who alleged publicly that he survived an armed attack in 2020 after accusing Lushtaku and associates of misappropriating wartime funds. Court proceedings later resulted in Lushtaku being fined for threatening Halilaj, while relatives of Lushtaku faced separate charges connected to violence surrounding the case.
Gunpowder Chronicles investigations also traced Lushtaku’s growing rhetorical escalation during Kosovo’s continuing political crisis. In September 2025, during a televised appearance on Klan Kosova, Lushtaku called for political opponents to be “dragged through the streets of Pristina”, language critics described as deeply alarming in a country still shaped by unresolved political killings and wartime trauma.
More recently, the investigations documented Lushtaku’s public visit to Libya in January 2026, where he met Khalifa Haftar, the eastern Libyan military strongman whose forces maintain longstanding ties with Russian security networks. Photographs published by Lushtaku7 showed ceremonial meetings and exchanges with Haftar in what analysts described as an unusual and politically charged alignment for a municipal figure from Kosovo.
The latest violence in Skenderaj therefore arrives against a backdrop far larger than a single café confrontation. Kosovo’s political system remains trapped between two competing visions of the state. On one side stands Kurti’s administration, which has sought to weaken the influence of entrenched patronage structures, dismantle Serbian parallel institutions in northern Kosovo and centralise state authority after decades of fragmented post-war governance. On the other stands an opposition constellation built around parties and figures that dominated Kosovo’s institutions for much of the post-independence period.
The conflict between those camps has steadily intensified. Vetëvendosje and its allies increasingly describe parts of the opposition as functioning less as democratic rivals than as networks protecting entrenched interests tied to organised crime, oligarchic power and, in some cases, Serbian and Russian influence operations. Opposition parties reject those accusations as authoritarian rhetoric designed to silence criticism and consolidate power around Kurti.
Yet what distinguishes Kosovo’s current crisis is the degree to which political confrontation repeatedly spills beyond institutions and into the language of menace, intimidation and physical confrontation.
In February 2025, during an election campaign stop by Kurti in Skenderaj, fireworks were thrown at supporters and formerly Justice Minister Albulena Haxhiu accused8 Lushtaku of attempting to obstruct the prime minister’s convoy with a municipal vehicle. Civil society groups condemned the incident as an attack on democratic norms.
Now, with another election approaching under conditions of deep institutional exhaustion, the violence involving Hysni Mehani has revived fears that Kosovo’s political culture is drifting further toward coercion rather than democratic competition.
The deeper concern for many observers is not simply whether isolated acts of violence occur, but whether the country’s institutions remain capable of containing the networks and rivalries that have shaped Kosovo’s post-war order for more than two decades.
As Kosovo prepares once again to vote, the question hanging over the republic is no longer only who will govern after June. It is whether the state itself can escape the cycle of paralysis, intimidation and unresolved power that continues to define its fragile democracy.
The Forces Driving Kosovo’s Cycle of Crisis
What appears as procedural deadlock in Kosovo is, in effect, a sustained disruption of governance that has stalled reform, weakened security, and forced repeated elections. — Balkan Dispatch.
Vetevendosje Facebook Press Release, May 14, 2026.
Sami Lushtaku’s Facebook Post, 14 May, 2026.
LDK’s Facebook Press Release, 14 May, 2026.
From Wartime Commander to the Face of Menacing Politics
From Drenica to Libya, Sami Lushtaku’s trajectory reveals how a wartime commander becomes a sanctioned political actor without ever truly relinquishing coercive power. — The Investigations Desk.
You can view this directly via the U.S. Department of the Treasury Sanctions List Search tool here — Sanctions List Search - OFAC (LUSHTAKU, Sami)
Albulena Haxhiu, Kosovar Minister of Justice — Facebook Post.
