The Price of Power and the Cost of Bread in Kosovo
Prices rise, dignity shrinks. The same corrupt elites who blocked price controls now decry inflation they helped create, Kosovo’s poor pay, while the powerful posture.
There is a peculiar cruelty in being asked to pay more for less. In Kosovo, that cruelty has begun to define the everyday lives of its citizens those who, in the throes of economic fragility, find themselves at the mercy of both visible and invisible hands tightening the noose of inflation around their necks. As of May 2025, the nation stumbles into yet another chapter of its modern history, where price hikes on electricity, bread, and coffee tell a more sinister tale than market fluctuations alone can explain.
In late April, Koha Ditore reported1 an unsettling trend: businesses across Kosovo began raising the prices of essential goods ahead of the official implementation of increased electricity tariffs, sanctioned by the Energy Regulatory Office (ZRRE). The hike: 16.1% – was justified in bureaucratic parlance as necessary for sustainability. But for the average citizen, already burdened by stagnant wages and systemic poverty, the impact has been little short of catastrophic. One loaf of bread now sells for €0.80, up from €0.60 merely weeks ago. In cafés across the capital, a macchiato, once the humble companion of civic discourse, has surged to €1.50.
The owner of a café in central Prishtina justified the increases with a shrug of inevitability: “The suppliers have raised their prices, and now we must do the same. Otherwise, we cannot survive.”
There’s a quiet desperation in those words, a confession of powerlessness masquerading as business logic. But beyond the surface lies a web of collusion, manipulation, and negligence.
The real scandal isn’t merely economic, it’s moral, political, and institutional. The very apparatus designed to shield the people from corporate greed and market abuse has been sabotaged. In October 2022, the Kurti-led government passed the Price Cap, an ambitious piece of legislation intended to curb opportunistic price hikes. Yet within weeks, opposition parties, acting with astonishing haste and suspicious unanimity, filed a motion against the law in the Constitutional Court.
One might recall Albert Camus, who in Combat wrote: "To be free is nothing, to become free is everything."
Here, the people of Kosovo were on the verge of becoming free from economic exploitation, only to be shackled once more by the very elites who claim to represent them2.
By November 2023, the Constitutional Court struck down the law. The arguments were cloaked in legalese, but the consequences were crystal clear: the state's only legal mechanism to regulate exploitative pricing had been dismantled. In the vacuum left behind, oligarchic interests, often shielded by opposition-aligned media and political figures with ties to US-blacklisted individuals3, filled the void. What followed was a deliberate inflationary siege, orchestrated under the guise of market freedom.
Selatin Kaçaniku, head of the Consumer Association, did not mince words: “The announcement of electricity hikes acted like a green light for businesses to raise their prices. This was a calculated move enabled by governmental silence and opposition sabotage.” He further lamented, “You’ve got to feel sorry for the consumers” — a colloquial despair echoed in the worn-out sighs of market-goers comparing yesterday’s price tags with today’s realities.
And yet, there is a more insidious element at play, an erosion of public trust engineered by a joint-enterprise criminal network cloaked in parliamentary legitimacy. The same political forces that for over two decades siphoned millions through phantom contracts such as the €22 million funnelled into firms linked to Milan Radoiçiq, a fugitive orchestrator of the armed incursion in northern Kosovo in September 2023, now cry foul over rising prices. Their orchestrated outrage, broadcast through pliant media outlets, is less about economic justice and more about political calculus.
The irony is obscene. Those who condemned the electricity tariff as an attack on the people had themselves obliterated the legal framework that could have mitigated its effects. It’s a Kafkaesque theatre in which the villains play victims, and the people are left to choose between bread and dignity.
Albert Camus warned us: "The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants." And so it is that the ‘defenders’ of the people have become the architects of their suffering. The manipulation is meticulous: foster economic desperation, engineer public discontent, and weaponise it against the current government. In doing so, they manufacture a narrative where Kurti’s administration, despite its legislative attempts to control prices, is framed as the culprit.
Meanwhile, hotel and restaurant owners, as noted by Hysni Sogojeva of the Hospitality and Tourism Chamber, are being squeezed to the brink of bankruptcy. "Businesses, especially in gastronomy and hospitality, are barely surviving," he says. The rising cost of electricity has forced them to either inflate their prices or shut their doors. And as prices climb, consumers retreat, creating a vicious cycle that chokes both demand and supply.
Wages remain stagnant. Rents creep upwards. Basic necessities like bread and milk become luxuries. And in this crucible of rising costs and vanishing support, the citizen is left to ask: who speaks for me?
The answer, at least for now, appears to be: no one with real power. The Court claims neutrality. The opposition claims innocence. The market claims inevitability. But the people, caught in this triangulated betrayal, know better.
Camus once said, "Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present." The present demands not just reactive indignation but structural courage, courage to expose complicity, to name those who profit from manufactured misery, and to defend the principle that markets, like governments, must serve the public good.
Kosovo does not lack resilience. But resilience must not be mistaken for consent. The people have weathered war, partition, and displacement. But they should not have to weather the greed of those who wear suits in parliament by day and sign contracts with criminals by night.
The lesson is bitter, but it must be learned: freedom is not merely the right to vote every four years; it is the right to live with dignity every day. And in a country where bread now costs more than truth, it is dignity that is most in danger.
The question, then, is not whether the prices will come down, but whether the people will rise up, not in protest alone, but in permanent vigilance. Only then can Kosovo truly become free.
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” —Albert Camus
For Kosovo, that summer will come. But only if we remember who tried to bury it and why.
Sabotaging the State, One Post at a Time
On a spring morning in Prishtina, as acting Prime Minister of the Republic of Kosovo Albin Kurti emerged from a government building, a formation of close protection officers surrounded him with precision. Their movements choreographed and professional, the security personnel kept their gazes trained, their steps sharp. But what ought to have been a routine demonstration of state security protocol became the subject of derision and ridicule in a series of social media posts by Berat Buzhala, one of Kosovo's most publicly visible media figures. Over the span of several days in late April 2025, Buzhala published four Facebook posts
Çmimet nisin “të fluturojnë” — KOHA Ditore.
Nis hetimi pas paralajmërimit për t’i shtrenjtuar 20 produkte — KOHA Ditore.
Striking writing.