Kosovo’s Institutions Play Putin’s Balkan Game

By certifying Arsenijevic’s party, Kosovo’s institutions are not protecting democracy; they are legitimising Belgrade’s Trojan horse and empowering a Kremlin-styled provocateur with credibility.

Democracy is not meant to be a suicide pact. When a young state faces an orchestrated campaign to hollow out its institutions, the first duty of its bodies is to defend the constitutional order. Kosovo’s Election Complaints and Appeals Panel (ECAP) has now done the opposite. In late August, ECAP ordered the Central Election Commission (CEC) to certify¹ Demokracia Serbe, the political vehicle of Aleksandar Arsenijevic, for the October 12th municipal elections. This came days after the same panel compelled the CEC to reinstate² the Belgrade-directed Serb List for the same ballot, after commissioners initially balked at certifying candidates who simultaneously draw salaries in Serbia’s illegal “parallel institutions” on Kosovo’s soil.

On the surface, both rulings are presented as procedural housekeeping: the commissions, it is said, had not properly grounded their refusals in statute and risked disenfranchising minorities. But to reduce these cases to box-ticking is to miss the wider reali…