Sitting behind a bare black desk, in a small whitewashed room in northern Kosovo, village mayor, Izmir Zeqiri, is still getting used to the glare of international attention. “It wasn’t my intention to be a celebrity,” he says as his mobile phone rings on repeat. “We thought more people would run, and we didn’t imagine we could win.”
This isn’t false modesty. Zeqiri is one of a few hundred ethnic Albanians in the Serb-majority municipality of Zubin Potok, and his candidacy in April’s elections was a symbolic gesture. But when Serb List, the Belgrade-backed party that controls much of public life in the Serb-majority northern municipalities, decided to boycott the poll and ordered Serb voters to follow suit, Zeqiri was propelled into the eye of a storm.
