Abstract
Amidst the arrival of the Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in Kosovo, the new coalition government of Vetevendosje and the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) under the leadership of Prime Minister Kurti (Vetevendosje) collapsed after a vote of no confidence on 25 March 2020. On the surface, the vote, initiated by LDK, was the consequence of a conflict over the appropriate Corona strategy. A two-month power struggle under the extraordinary circumstances of Corona-related restriction followed, resulting in a new LDK-led government in early June. The political crisis in Kosovo in the early-phase of Corona has to be analyzed against the background of a political crisis with legacies in the post-conflict period, the polarization between Vetevendosje and other parties, and the strong influence of external actors in Kosovo. In this forum article, I ask how the discourse on the “state of emergency” and the pandemic has influenced power struggles in Kosovo and how the conflicts have challenged the democratic competition and institutions. My main argument is that the pandemic indeed did not lead to any form of cooperation, but the political competitors used the pandemic for an intensification of their power struggle, which—for now—led to the restoration of a government of established elites, supported by diplomatic interventions from external actors.
Highlights
Kosovo has experienced fundamental societal and political transformations over the last three decades
Domestic politics are dynamic and highly competitive, with short-term governments and early re-elections, and conflicts centering on accusations of “state capture” by political elites, especially those who have emerged from the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) (Tadicand Elbasani 2018)
I want to re-construct how the Corona (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic influenced the competition between political opponents, which even led to the downfall of a government in March, and how the power struggle challenged the state institutions
Summary
Kosovo has experienced fundamental societal and political transformations over the last three decades. If we understand the rise of Corona in February/March as an extraordinary crisis, interdisciplinary literature gives us examples on how political opponents can engage in short-term cooperation and mutual support (for example of governments by oppositions) in such periods of emergency in democracies, e.g. in the United States after the attacks on 11 September 2001 (Entman 2003; Owens 2009) or in the economic crisis after 2009 in European states (Moury and De Giorgi 2015) These phenomena could be defined as “antagonistic cooperation” between political adversaries to pursue common interests for a specific time in a clear institutional set-up While there is a possibility for short-term “antagonistic cooperation” between political opponents in a democratic set-up when faced with an extraordinary crisis, studies on epidemics/pandemics do highlight rising mistrust, strong state-centered reactions, and the dominance of political grievances over cooperation
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