I.
While the world moves at a speed that often surpasses its own logic, small states like Kosovo do not have even the slightest opportunity for institutional mistakes. Ukraine entered the fifth year of its struggle for survival. Germany, once convinced that the era of armaments was closed forever, is now reopening that chapter without hesitation. In the US, Trump has turned foreign policy into a cold balance of interests, where everything is measured and everything else is negotiated. Meanwhile, the European Union, once the guiding axis of the Balkans, is struggling with internal fatigue and a decline in the global order.
This is a new international order and I say it with conviction that it requires to be read with clarity, without illusions and without wasting time. Kosovo is precisely within this order with issues that are both active and unresolved. We recently became founding members of the Peace Board, with operational commitments that require daily attention. The trial of the former KLA leaders is entering its final phase and with it comes a political, institutional and moral burden that is not measured by the verdict, but by the long-term effects on the state. The dialogue with Serbia is changing forms while the US has increased its direct presence in the process and the EU has lost the authority that kept that process functional. European integration continues without new dynamics and without credible deadlines.
I say very clearly that all of these processes are active simultaneously and each of them requires a presidential figure with its own weight, not a symbolic figure who learns the task by exercising it.
I am not writing this as a comment on the names that are circulating nor as an exercise in the party balances of the moment. I am writing this as someone who has followed the international situation closely and has come to the simple conclusion that the presidential profile that Kosovo needs now cannot emerge from a last-minute compromise, because that compromise has completely different goals. Because international challenges do not expect the new president to learn the names of foreign diplomats. Kosovo needs someone who has known international politics from the inside for years and who sits down on the first day as a weighty interlocutor, not as a new appointment that needs to be introduced.
II.
The President of Kosovo, according to the Constitution, has limited powers, but he has an international scope that no other institution has. He represents the state as a broader subject than the next government, and this difference is immediately understood by international diplomats, who use him as a separate channel. The President, with his own network, his own credibility and his own personal weight, opens channels to the state that the Prime Minister cannot replace. The President, without these three things, closes those channels precisely when we need them most.
The role of the president today is primarily international, not because the Constitution provides for it, but because the situation imposes it. The Peace Board will require rapid decision-making and will address precisely the figure of the president as the voice of the state. The dialogue with Serbia, if it moves towards the American format, needs a figure who enjoys personal trust built with key partners.
The new president, without an international profile, will start his term from scratch and it will take months, perhaps years, before he is a serious interlocutor to key partners. This is understandable as a process, but it is not acceptable as a solution when operational demands are already active. The months of building that network are months during which the Peace Board produces obligations, the dialogue with Serbia expects positions, and the Hague tribunal requires credible institutional communication. I say very clearly that this initial gap is not a price that the new president pays, but Kosovo pays.
III.
Serbia offers the clearest lesson on the strategic value of continuity, and I say this with some bitterness, because we have not yet learned it. Vučić has maintained the role of Serbia’s leading international figure for many years, building personal acquaintances with various leaders and accumulating negotiating space with each meeting. The result is visible and documented. Serbia has much greater freedom of movement than its position and size would suggest. This freedom does not come from military or economic strength. It comes from the continuity of a weighty figure and from the trust accumulated with key international interlocutors.
If Kosovo now elects a president with a figure without an international profile, it weakens itself precisely when the opponent has been moving carefully and consistently for years. Of course, I could be wrong. But the history of this process does not offer many arguments for optimism.
There is a paradox here that few address. The criticisms of past Kosovo presidencies, which have been too close to the government line and not sufficiently independent figures, are fair and I do not reject them, because I have expressed them myself. But the argument for a change of figure as a solution to that problem ignores half of the analysis. A president willing to distance himself from the executive also needs institutional space and a political culture that allows for that distance, and this is something that is often forgotten when discussing presidential independence. The problem of presidential dependence on the ruling party is not solved by a change of figure if the institutional culture remains the same. It is solved by a change of approach, and this change can also be made within continuity.
IV.
The presidential profile that Kosovo needs most today is definable and tested, and I say this not as an abstract wish, but as an assessment based on what small states with active international issues need. The moment requires documented personal acquaintance with key international interlocutors, acquaintance that is built through years of work and presence, not by appointment.
The time is clear about what it wants. It requires a proven presence in key state processes, whether as a diplomat, as an institutional leader or as a civil society figure with a real international network. International interlocutors quickly recognize when a presidential figure is a product of party balances and not the result of a career. And when they do, they treat him accordingly.
Kosovo has personalities with the necessary profiles and I say this with full conviction. There are former diplomats and active diplomats with long international experience. There are former institutional leaders with a documented presence in European and American processes. There are figures from the civil sector with real international networks. So the deficit is not one of supply. It is a deficit of the process, because the current presidential election process does not produce the profile, but produces the party balance of the moment.
And I understand why someone might think otherwise. The party process has its own logic and it is not always wrong. But when the challenges are of this nature and this speed, party logic and state logic should not produce the same result.
(The author is an independent researcher, specializing in Political Science and International Relations)