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But less than two months after Kurti’s government was formed, rifts opened up between Vetevendosje and the LDK on critical issues such as the 100% tariffs on imports from Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina and the handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Kurti sacked interior minister Agim Veliu, one of the LDK’s ministerial appointments, when Veliu backed calls from Thaci to declare a state of emergency, prompting the LDK to call a confidence vote in the government.
After the vote, Kurti accused then US president Donald Trump’s envoy for
the Western Balkans, Richard Grenell, of being “directly involved” in bringing down his government. Kurti argued at a press conference that Grenell saw him as an obstacle to the deal with Serbia that the White House wanted ahead of the US’ autumn presidential election.
The next government, led by the LDK’s Avdullah Hoti, didn’t last much longer,
as the Constitutional Court ruled in December that the vote to appoint Hoti’s cabinet had been invalid, thus prompting the snap election – the fifth since Kosovo gained independence in 2008.
The failure of Kurti’s 2020 government hasn’t dented his popularity. “I am expecting a clear win by Levizja Vetevendosje for several reasons. Firstly, the other parties that used to rule the country so far have disappointed the people by not being able to improve the lives of the population in a considerable way. Secondly, the first Kurti government at the beginning of last year sparked enthusiasm within the population,” says Adem Ferizaj, graduate teaching assistant at Soas University of London.
On the contrary, the controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s suspected interference in Kosovo’s domestic policies contributed to the groundswell of support that has seen the share of voters favouring Vetevendosje in recent polls reach almost double the share he received in October 2019. The suggestion that Kurti was victim to what effectively amounts to a coup by Washington left its legacy, says Ferizaj, “it especially led to a further politicisation changing the political awareness of a major part of the society.”
Nor has the Kosovan Central Election Commission (CEC) decision not to certify Kurti and two other members of his party because of their convictions for tear gas attacks in the parliament damaged his standing in the polls. Vetevendosje has insisted Kurti will remain on its list, even though the
CEC says votes cast for him or fellow candidates Albulena Haxhiu and Bajram Mavriqi will not be counted.
From street protests to parliament
Both Kurti and Vetevedosje have come
a very long way since the early days of independence. When the Kosovan war broke out in 1998 Kurti was a student
at the University of Pristina, where he organised protests against the Yugoslav police’s occupation of the campus that were brutally put down. Like other leading politicians such as Thaci, Veseli and former prime minister Ramush Haradinaj, Kurti was a member of the KLA, working for its political representative Adem Demaci. During the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Kurti was arrested and beaten, then sentenced to 15 years in prison. His release was secured under international pressure after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime in Belgrade.
Yet while other Kosovan politicians went on to enjoy a cosy relationship with
the representatives of the international community in the country – the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) – Kurti has campaigned vigorously against them.
Vetevendosje – the party name means “self-determination” in Albanian – grew out of the Kosova Action Network (KAN), which also promoted human rights and social justice. Kurti was among hundreds of activists arrested and convicted during protests in 2005, the year Vetevendosje was founded, when they wrote "No negotiations, Self- Determination" on UNMIK buildings.
Vetevendosje clashed again with the UN presence in Kosovo in February 2007, when it organised a protest against the Ahtisaari Plan, a proposed settlement agreement for Kosovo, that turned violent.
Romanian UN police officers killed two protesters and injured 80 others. Kurti was arrested again and sentenced.
Initially outside mainstream party poli- tics, Vetevendosje entered parliament for the first time in 2010, slightly increasing its share of the vote in 2014, and almost doubling it to become the largest party in the parliament after the 2017 and 2019 elections. Even after entering parliament Vetevendosje remained a rebel force; Kurti and other MPs repeatedly let off smoke bombs in the assembly in protest against an agreement with Belgrade giving limited autonomy to Serbs in northern Kosovo in autumn 2015. They used the same tactic in 2018, when MPs met to vote on a border demarcation deal with Montenegro.
At a time when many of the parties
and movements that have challenged the political establishment are from
the populist right, Vetevendosje is a relatively rare example in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region of a left-wing popular movement that has managed to gain mass appeal. The chal- lengers to the entrenched local elites in other Western Balkans have mainly been from the far right, such as the parties that co-opted protests against President Aleksandar Vucic in Serbia last summer and some members of the new govern- ment in Montenegro that successfully ousted President Milo Djukanovic’s Democratic Party of Socialists after 30 years in power. Another emerging right- wing force is the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR) that took a star- tlingly high 9% of the vote in Romania’s December general election barely a year after it was founded.
Yet the last decade has also seen left- wing anti-establishment movements shift from the fringes to the mainstream, not only Vetevendosje, but also Syrzia, which took power in Greece, as well
as Spain’s Podemos, which grew out
of mass protests against inequality
and corruption to become one of the country’s largest parties and a member of the current government. Vetevendosje is heading to a convincing win in the elections, but it is not clear if it will be able to form a government.
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