The Discipline of Consolidation
Albin Kurti: Two interviews, one temperament. Abroad, philosophical and restrained. At home, combative and procedural. The constant is power routed through institutions.
I am a careful and critical listener of our best British podcast The Rest is Politics1 moderated by Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. I was in Bosnia in April 2024 when I listened to Albin Kurti’s first long personal insight interview on that programme. I remember the setting clearly because Bosnia was not incidental to the listening experience. I was there to observe the political and social consequences of a system in which a Kremlin favoured Bosnian Serb leader had spent years hollowing out institutions while maintaining the appearance of legality. The atmosphere was one of quiet exhaustion. Politics there had become a permanent background noise of grievance ambiguity and low level menace. It was against that backdrop that Kurti’s voice arrived through my headphones. Calm insistent unembellished. It landed differently because of where I was.
What struck me first was not what Kurti said about Serbia or Russia but how he spoke about himself. He rejected the idea that becoming prime m…
