Seventeen years after Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, its future remains shadowed and compromised by relations with Belgrade. More than a decade of normalisation talks have so far been a road to nowhere, stymied principally by Serbia’s refusal to recognise its former territory’s right to the attributes of nationhood. In the country’s four northern Serb-majority municipalities, the deadlock has occasionally turned deadly as Kosovo’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, has attempted to enforce sovereignty, resisted by Belgrade-backed rebels.
There are tentative grounds for hoping that the outcome of Kosovo’s latest election on Sunday, in which Mr Kurti’s ruling party came first but lost its majority, can deliver a route out of this impasse. Mr Kurti’s understandable but sometimes heavy-handed moves to demonstrate Pristina’s control over the north – such as imposing ethnic Albanian mayors after a mass election boycott by ethnic Serbs – have been strongly criticised by both the European Union and the US. On the eve of the poll, Richard Grenell, the newly appointed US special envoy for special missions, said that relations between Washington and Pristina had “never been lower”.
