The Run-off Teaches Responsibility

Kosovo’s elections spotlight citizen agency, exposing weak local governance and lazy journalism, evidence matters, accountability bites, and scorekeeping misreads a democracy learning to demand.

The line held for a beat before Alfred Lela’s voice came through brisk, companionable, already moving. We were not setting the world to rights, we were trying to read a small country’s pulse. The prompt was local elections in Kosovo, but the conversation spilled beyond ward maps and turnout rates into the grammar of accountability, who counts the votes, who names the winners, who answers for the silence between announcement and fact.

The first question, why the Central Election Commission’s preliminary results had been delayed, should have been simple. It was not. The explanations offered to the public had come in headline form “technical issues,” “connectivity problems” with little in the way of documentary ballast. In a system a quarter-century old, that absence is not merely a procedural hiccup, it is an editorial one. Where institutions present vagueness, the press has a duty to insist on particulars, logs, incident reports, chain-of-custody notes, timestamps that survive scrutiny. Kosovo’s media, I argued, have too often let that duty slide quick to relay the claim, slow to demand the evidence. When processes blur, accountability does too.

From mechanics we moved to meaning. More than half the municipalities were headed to run-offs, a stark picture of fragmentation, Lela said, perhaps without precedent. Fragmentation can be a symptom of volatility, it can also be a sign of voters learning to discriminate between rhetoric and results. The electorate did not vote on abstractions. It assessed mayors on four years of street-level delivery roads, schools, utilities, contracts fulfilled or sculpted into theatre near the next campaign. If an incumbent breaks ground the week before a vote on projects promised four years earlier, the timing is not an administrative footnote, it is the argument. Citizens, as employers, took note.

On numbers, we parted company. Lela insisted that Lëvizja Vetëvendosje had slipped behind the Democratic League and the Democratic Party (LDK) on the national share, casting this as the real story, while I pointed to Koha Ditore’s reporting aligned with the Central Election Commission’s tallies and underlined that Vetëvendosje led the race for mayoralties¹. One can read the same election through different lenses, municipal executives versus assembly seats, first-round vote shares versus eventual control of councils, but sources are not a choose-your-own-adventure. When one cites “the papers,” one should name them, and when one disputes a result, one should show the ledger. If a journalist sits across from me, the least we owe the audience is specificity. “According to whom?” is not pedantry, it is the spine of public trust.

A brief detour is warranted here. Newsrooms would do well to temper their appetite for headline scorekeeping “who won, who lost” especially on the night of first rounds. The more instructive story is often the public’s capacity to change its mind. When voters punish incumbents who under-delivered and reward those who met their promises, they model the citizenship that democracies depend on, observant, unsentimental, and free of clientelist muscle memory. Celebrate that reflex. The obsession with league tables turns politics into sport, the better question is whether the electorate is learning to withhold and to grant power in proportion to performance. On this point, Lela’s insistence on “who finished first” misreads the civic texture of the moment.

The conversation inevitably climbed from municipalities to the national impasse. Why seven months without a government after February’s vote? Here we entered the uncomfortable country where intelligence services, kompromat, and political brokerage coexist. My position, grounded in work we have published over two years, is that Serbia’s services, sometimes in concert with compromised elements within Kosovo’s own security structures, have cultivated leverage over a critical mass of political actors. The arrest of figures who functioned as brokers in this ecosystem², and the timing of parliamentary consolidation that followed, are not coincidences, they are clues.

Lela said, candidly, that he could neither endorse nor refute such claims. Caution is healthy, incuriosity is not. If broadcasters invite guests to make consequential assertions on air, they must either have done the homework to test those assertions or commit to doing it in real time, documents, timelines, corroboration, contestation. Otherwise, the programme becomes a conveyor belt for untested claims, and the burden of proof slides unfairly onto the guest’s reputation rather than standing on the strength of the evidence itself. When I cite, I cite cleanly, when I infer, I say so. The host’s “I cannot verify” should trigger further questions, not function as a shrug that leaves investigative work hanging under a haze of doubt.

There was also the matter of tone, the undertext Lela floated that warnings about compromised elites and the absence of credible alternatives amount to venerating a single figure and, by extension, flirting with authoritarianism. This is a familiar trope in our region, reduce the critique of corruption to fandom, then warn darkly about cults of personality. It fails a basic journalistic test. Authoritarian drift is not something one intuits from rhetorical vibes, it is documented through patterns, the capture of courts, the intimidation of the press, the manipulation of electoral rules, the criminalisation of dissent. If one alleges a slide, one should bring the ledger cases filed, laws changed, editors fired, orders given. Otherwise the charge is a mood dressed as analysis, and it blunts the very tools we need should genuine authoritarianism appear.

This is not a plea for indulgence toward any incumbent. “The wrong is wrong,” as we say, and wrongdoers should be moved aside. But clearing corrupt operators is not about building monuments to those who remain, it is about opening space. When journalism helps establish what happened and by whose hand it pries open the pipeline for a newer generation to enter, compete, and, if we are lucky, surpass the current one. Our aim is not neutrality for its own sake and certainly not the lesser evil, it is a more demanding politics, with better candidates compelled by public expectation rather than insulated by party machinery.

We circled back to responsibility. Lela repeatedly pocketed municipal failures as a verdict on Albin Kurti, as though the performance of a mayor is a referendum on the prime minister’s soul. Leadership carries political responsibility for nominations and culture, yes, but it does not absolve the official on the ground of individual duty, nor does it collapse local accountability into a single national protagonist. If a municipality is mismanaged, say which contracts, which projects, which budgets, and by whom. If a party tolerates that mismanagement, say how, by which disciplinary lapses or incentives. Precision is not a kindness to power, it is pressure that bites.

There were other shadows at the edge of the call. The vandalism at my family home in Gjilan³, windows shattered, fixtures smashed, a car ruined, the brief detention of minors with apparent ties to political families, was not a sidebar to a television segment. It is the ambient warning that accompanies investigative work in fragile democracies, that the excavation of networks carries a cost off-screen. Such episodes are not proof of anything by themselves, they are reminders of context, of who benefits from disorder.

The hour ended with the familiar television sign-off—gratitude, a joke about recording equipment, the cheerful drift back into daily life. The larger work continues where the call cut, in documents and court filings, in procurement records and voting logs, in interviews taped and transcribed, in retractions issued when we get it wrong and in stubborn clarity when we do not. Elections come in waves, institutions mature or stall in the long, slow undertow between them. Journalism either keeps its footing there specific, sourced, a little unfashionable in its insistence on receipts, or it gets swept along by the noise, counting winners while the public, quietly, does the more serious thing: changing its mind.

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1. VV-ja dominon në garën për kryetarë, PDK-ja për asamble — KOHA Ditore.

2. Milaim Zeka & Fatmir Sheholli, Kosovo’s Intelligence Whiplash — The GPC.

3. PRESS RELEASE: Journalist Vudi Xhymshiti Condemns Vandalism of Family Home in Kosovo

Investigative journalist Vudi Xhymshiti condemns the vandalism of his family home in Kosovo, calling it a criminal intimidation linked to his exposés on Serbian espionage networks. — The GPC Press Release.

NUJ condemns vandalism at Kosovo home of London-based journalist

Britain’s journalists’ union condemned vandalism at Vudi Xhymshiti’s family home in Kosovo, urging a inquiry into intimidation allegedly linked to his reporting on espionage networks. — The GPC Media Watch.

The Cartelisation of Kosovo’s Press

AJK’s silence after the vandalism wasn’t neutrality; it was complicity, proof of a cartelised press that protects its patrons, punishes critics, and abandons journalism’s first duty. — The GPC Media Watch.