Panovic: Kurti was carried away the Albanian support in his conflict with the Serbs and the USA; that is a bad calculation

Demostat Program Director Zoran Panovic told Kosovo Online that he did not rule out the possibility that Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti, carried away by the support he had among Albanians due to his tough stance in the dialogue with Belgrade and his opposition to America, would call elections in order to take advantage of his popularity, but he also pointed out that it could turn out to be a miscalculation.

Panovic points out that he is convinced that many Western countries would not have recognized Kosovo if Kurti had been in power at the time of the declaration of independence.

"Kosovo was recognized as an independent country by the main countries of the West, but if it was not recognized then, with the Albanian leadership currently in Pristina, the USA, and the EU countries, I am convinced, would not have done it," Panovic said.

According to him, Kurti shows no inclination to compromise.

"I don't see that Kurti can lead a big compromise policy, I think that his political personality structure is not like that. The formation of the Community of Serb-majority Municipalities would be a political defeat for him. But he is not the one who negotiated the CSM, it resulted from the Brussels Agreement," Panovic says.

He points out that his main problem is that he needs to implement something he would never sign.

"If Kurti had been in Brussels then, it would have been another of the failed negotiations, if he had been in Washington instead of Hoti, it would have failed," he says.

He explains that it is certain that Kurti is delaying the formation of the CSM in order to retain his electorate.

"The formation of the CSM would be the defeat of Kurti's policy," he believes.

Panovic reminds that Kosovo is a generational problem for both Serbs and Albanians.

"It cannot be 'packed' overnight, and it cannot be packed even in the context of the Ukrainian war, Kosovo is something that lasts much longer. When it comes to the Albanian side, regardless of whether they were Maoists, Enverists or Titoists, supporters of human rights - the goal has always been the same, that is an independent Kosovo," Panovic said.

He added that "what Kurti is doing is rounding off an ethno-nationalist project".

"There is no great philosophy and it is rather absurd, and sometimes even banal, to imagine that the relationship in Kosovo is a conflict between a civil Albanian side and a pro-Putin hegemonic Serbian side. It also seems tragicomic. In that way, Kurti wants to finish that project and try to fit the Albanian narrative into the narrative that is dominant in the West that the Russians are the bad guys, and the Ukrainians are the good guys. And according to that logic, Serbia is an exponent of Russia, but it can be seen that the West does not take that for granted. Serbia managed to reconstruct the somewhat lost capital of the alliance with the West," Panovic assesses.