Kosovo Elects Justina Shiroka Pula President in Overnight Vote
Kosovo's Assembly elected Justina Shiroka Pula as president in the first minutes of October 7, with 81 votes in her favor. Al Jazeera
That total passed the 80-vote bar for election, a two-thirds majority of lawmakers, by one vote. The vote came just before the constitutional deadline ran out.
The vote followed a late-night deal between the ruling Vetevendosje Movement (LVV) and the opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) to back Pula as a shared candidate. That deal allowed the late-night parliamentary ballot to go ahead. If lawmakers had failed to elect a president, Kosovo would have faced early parliamentary elections. Al Jazeera
The Assembly record lists the vote under its October 6, 2026 session, which ran past midnight into October 7. The official website of the President of Kosovo later published Pula's speech to the Assembly. The presidency is largely ceremonial, meaning the president performs public and symbolic duties while the government holds executive power. Reuters
Pula is an economist, age 73, born in Pristina in 1953. She is Kosovo's third woman president, after Atifete Jahjaga and Vjosa Osmani. She served as minister of energy and mining from 2008 to 2011 and as a PDK member of parliament from 2011 to 2014. At the University of Pristina she moved from assistant lecturer to professor and led the department of management and informatics, and she later became the first woman to lead the Kosovo Academy of Sciences and Arts (ASHAK).
The presidential vote was part of a wider political settlement. Parties agreed to adopt changes to the law that governs the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. That court, based in The Hague, was set up to try former Kosovo Liberation Army leaders accused of war crimes. The agreement is a promise to pass those changes, not a law already passed. Protests against the convictions of former Kosovo Liberation Army leaders took place as the midnight deadline to elect a president approached.
The broader context here is that keeping the presidency filled was linked directly to war-crimes justice. With a presidency that holds limited formal powers, the cost of agreement was placed outside the presidency itself, in future action on the Specialist Chambers. That arrangement gives both LVV and PDK a stake in Pula's term while leaving the harder decision for the Assembly calendar.
In my view, three questions now carry the story forward. First, whether the 81-vote coalition holds when the promised changes come to a vote, since one defection would have blocked the presidency ballot. Second, how international partners that support the court's legitimacy respond to any change to its framework. Third, whether Pula, with a background in economics and academia rather than a current party leadership job, can act as a neutral referee if those debates sharpen. The election met the deadline. It shifted the underlying dispute to the lawmaking process.
