A string of long-awaited elections, as well as changing international dynamics, are reshaping the region, as our selection of Balkan Insight Premium stories this week highlights.
Winners and losers
A new election in Bosnia and Herzegovina came with new technologies intended to increase the integrity of the voting process, sparking speculation ahead of the vote about how this might affect the results. Ultimately, the new technologies proved to be about the only novel thing in the elections.
Contrary to the expectations of many, voters reaffirmed support for entrenched nationalist parties even more strongly than they did four years ago. Nominally civic, leftist or pro-Bosnian parties were big losers. Our two analyses take a look at who the winners and losers of the elections were, as well as the prospects for government formation at state and entity levels.
Calmer waters?
After a rollercoaster political week, is Kosovo sailing into calmer voters? A drama was triggered by the guilty verdict handed down to former Kosovo Liberation Army leader and former Kosovo president Hashim Thaci for war crimes by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in the Hague.
All this converged with an October 6 deadline set by the Constitutional Court for Kosovo’s parliament to elect a new President, or face dissolution and yet another election. At the 11th hour, political leaders struck a deal to elect Justina Shiroka Pula as President. Our analysis looks at who the new President is and what her election could mean for Kosovo.
Changing world
Kosovo may have snapped out of its cycle of institutional blockage with the election of a new President, but what does the future hold? Internationally, the country has never looked more isolated.
In an opinion piece for Balkan Insight, Fron Nahzi examines the US’s changing relationship with Kosovo. Gone are the days when Washington was interested in nurturing Kosovo’s statehood and political development. It remains to be seen how the political actors in Kosovo adjust to this reality.
Electoral test
Serbia’s two-year-long political crisis, triggered by the collapse of the railway station canopy in Novi Sad, which killed 16 people, is reaching its culmination. Parliamentary elections on October 25, followed by presidential elections at an unspecified later date, will test popular support for the ruling Progressive Party and its main challenger, the Student List.
The Student List began as a university-centred protest movement demanding justice and rejecting politics. Since then, it has transitioned, somewhat reluctantly, into a movement competing for power. Our analysis tracks this evolution and weighs the Student List’s prospects of success.
End of the road?
Albania’s Special Prosecution Office Against Corruption and Organised Crime, SPAK, has scored many a success in prosecuting high-profile political figures since its creation in 2016. So much so that many across the region are watching in amazement and wondering how such prosecutions are possible.
But could its days of fighting corruption and organised crime be numbered? An attempt to rewrite large chunks of the country’s criminal code, some of it merited, is raising concerns that the real agenda of the legal amendments is to defang the SPAK.
Discouraging activism
Norwegian aid worker Tommy Olsen is standing trial in Greece, accused, among other things, of creating a criminal organisation and helping to facilitate the unlawful entry of migrants into Greece. In reality, he has been working to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants in the country since 2015, but little more than that.
So what is the case really about? In an interview with BIRN, Olsen sets out his argument that his trial – and other similar trials – are a heavy-handed tactic aimed at discouraging others from even thinking of offering assistance of migrants.
Source: balkaninsight.com
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