Brussels – The institutional instability in Kosovo can be summed up in a few lines from the agenda of the Commissioner for Enlargement, Marta Kos. “On her first official visit” to Pristina on 15 May, she “will meet Acting President Albulena Haxhiu and Caretaker Prime Minister Albin Kurti.” Following the postponement of the visit due to critical political developments in mid-March, two months later no fully empowered institution will be in place to receive the EU’s enlargement chief.
The trip scheduled for 12 March had to be cancelled precisely because Kosovo “lacked fully constituted and legitimate institutions capable of serving as credible interlocutors,” recalls Donika Emini, Research Fellow at the University of Graz and member of the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group (BiEPAG), speaking with The New Union Post. “She now arrives in the midst of an election campaign,” with all political attention directed almost entirely inwards. “This could not be a worse political moment for the visit, which risks producing neither the desired results for the EU nor for Pristina,” she warns.
In any case, just three weeks away from early elections scheduled for 7 June, “the visit itself matters,” Emini makes clear, echoing the Commission’s stated purpose for the visit – underscoring the EU’s “unwavering support” for Kosovo’s European integration and the need for “swift and decisive” reforms to advance this path.
“Under different institutional circumstances, this visit could have represented a genuine turning point in Kosovo’s relations with the EU, including with member states and the Brussels institutions alike,” she says. On the contrary, in the current political and institutional environment, it now risks being received as “a courtesy call to a country in the middle of its third election campaign in sixteen months.”
An important visit in an unstable environment
It is precisely the first visit of the EU’s enlargement chief to Kosovo that explains the importance of this moment for Brussels–Pristina relations. “Marta Kos has emerged as one of the most substantively engaged enlargement commissioners the Western Balkans has seen in recent years,” Emini points out, referring to the way the Slovenian member of the Commission has re-energised the enlargement agenda “at a moment of renewed geopolitical interest in the region.”
While she has already visited all the other Western Balkan countries since taking office in autumn 2024, she has faced criticism for not engaging with Pristina sooner. However, that criticism has often overlooked that “the constraint has not been a lack of political will in Brussels, but the absence of institutional counterparts in Pristina capable of engaging with genuine authority and continuity.” At other words, the Commission “has tried to be present,” while Kosovar authorities “have not always been able to meet it,” especially in light of the political turmoil following the 9 February 2025 elections.
According to the Research Fellow at the University of Graz, this is precisely what makes the current moment “particularly costly” for Pristina. The EU recently lifted its restrictive measures, reopening political space for deeper bilateral engagement, while it has never stopped the process of allocating “the most significant financial and political opportunity Kosovo has had since independence” – namely €939.2 million tied to a structured reform agenda under the Growth Plan for the Western Balkans. However, “both processes have effectively been on hold due to Kosovo’s inability to function as a credible counterpart.”
The Growth Plan was adopted with considerable delay in April 2026 and, since then, no single required reform step has been adopted. Although €61.8 million in pre-financing has been disbursed, Kosovo risks losing €68.8 million if EU-related reforms are not implemented by June 2026, two sources familiar with the matter told The New Union Post. “This is not solely a consequence of the current caretaker situation,” Emini stresses, referring to a “governing failure that predates the latest electoral cycle.” This points to “something more systemic than institutional paralysis alone.”
The official visit on 15 May also carries a strategic dimension that Kosovo “should be capitalising on rather than merely surviving.” Despite the complex Brussels–Pristina relationship, with five EU member states – Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain – still refusing to recognise its sovereignty and blocking its application for EU membership, Commissioner Kos has been among the most vocal EU officials on rule of law backsliding in Serbia over the past year and a half, an issue that Kosovo has long urged to be addressed within and beyond the EU-mediated Belgrade–Pristina dialogue. “Her political posture, therefore, offers a rare moment of alignment between Kosovo’s strategic expectations and the Commission’s current orientation toward the region,” Emini notes.
While engagement will continue in the coming months, mostly at a technical level, “political trust and momentum are harder to sustain” when counterparts lack full institutional authority, when reform commitments are not respected, and when official visits must be rescheduled around domestic dysfunction. As confirmed by the Commission, Kosovo’s European perspective remains intact. Yet Emini warns that “what is eroding is its credibility and leverage” – not only when they are most needed, but also at a time when the geopolitical window for enlargement “may not remain open indefinitely.”
What happened in Kosovo in the last 16 months
On 9 February 2025, the left-wing nationalist Vetëvendosje party won the parliamentary elections. However, the result fell far short of expectations. Unlike in the 2021 elections, Prime Minister Albin Kurti did not gain enough support in the 120-seat Assembly to form a government with Vetëvendosje’s 48 MPs and the 10 MPs representing the non-Serb, non-majority communities.
Kurti rejected any cooperation with the Serb List – the largest party representing the Serb community – but was unable to reach an agreement with the third-largest party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), with which he had been in coalition when he first became Prime Minister in 2020.
With opposition parties unable to form an alternative coalition, the process of electing the Speaker of Parliament remained blocked for months, with the Constitutional Court intervening twice in an attempt to resolve the institutional crisis. However, another issue further prolonged the stalemate, as the Serb List denounced what it described as a potential violation of the constitutional right of the largest party representing the Serb community to appoint a Deputy Speaker.
Before the Constitutional Court issued its decision, Kurti failed to form a government. President Osmani dissolved Parliament and called snap elections for 28 December. At the second vote of 2025, Vetëvendosje secured a landslide victory – increasing its share of the vote from 42.3% to 49.3% – giving Prime Minister Kurti a clear parliamentary majority for his third consecutive cabinet, which was formed on 11 February.
Despite high expectations of renewed momentum in relations with the EU, the presidential elections in March 2026 jeopardised both the election of a new head of state and the stability of the government.
The two-thirds threshold in Parliament – requiring at least 80 MPs to be present and voting in the first two rounds – was not met due to obstruction by the opposition parties, prompting then-President Osmani to dissolve Parliament on 6 March. The decree was challenged by Prime Minister Kurti, with the Constitutional Court setting a deadline of 28 April for the election of a new President of the Republic. The failure of the vote on 27 April paved the way for acting President Albulena Haxhiu to call snap elections, scheduled for 7 June.
