Sixty-two deputies elected a cabinet on Sunday. About 75 is the most it can find for the vote that decides whether this Assembly survives. Until that number reaches 80, or the Assembly dissolves, the ministers' names are not news.
Editorial Board | 14 September 2026
Kosovo has a government. Sixty-two deputies voted for it on Sunday. Readers will have noticed that we have not written about it, and we are not going to, because Sunday answered a question nobody was asking.
Kosovo did not lack 61 votes for a government. It has not lacked them since June. What it lacked, and what sent the country to an election in the spring, was the arrangement that keeps an Assembly alive through the presidential ballot. Article 86 gives that ballot three attempts; the first two need 80 votes, and if the third fails the Assembly dissolves and the country votes within 45 days.
The presidential ceiling for this Assembly is about 75. Vetëvendosje has 53, its minority partners ten, and Lumir Abdixhiku brings the twelve LDK deputies who still follow him. Six others, Kujtim Shala among them, have said they will not vote for Bekim Sejdiu. Bedri Hamza has said PDK is not part of the presidential agreement and will not vote for him either. On Friday Kurti put the problem in one sentence: "They need our vote in favour; for us, even one against does the job." He needed PDK in the room. On Saturday night he stopped asking, and on Sunday the Assembly was declared constituted with four deputy speakers and a cabinet by evening.
PDK went to the Constitutional Court this morning. The Court's answer will decide whether Sunday's procedure was lawful. It will not decide whether PDK votes for a president. Whatever the Court rules, PDK will not be in the room for that ballot. It said so before the constitutive session opened, and a judgment in its favour would only make that easier to sustain.
So Sunday showed that Kurti can govern until the presidential vote. It showed nothing about whether this legislature survives it. The 45-day clock has not started. The government was formed without removing the mechanism that starts it.
We will write about the ministers when 80 deputies are in the room for the first ballot, or when the Assembly dissolves. Until then, they are a cabinet waiting for a vote it does not have.
