Vladisavljev: Dialogue will not suffer due to the election campaign, there were no results anyway

Stefan Vladisavljev, Program Coordinator of the BFPE Foundation for a Responsible Society, says that the dialogue process between Pristina and Belgrade should not suffer due to the elections in Kosovo scheduled for February 9th, and considering the lack of results from the dialogue in the previous period, the election campaign does not have much to impact.

"Nothing significant has been agreed upon or implemented in the past year anyway. Also, until now, the dialogue has managed to function at some technical level, primarily through emissaries, whether we are talking about the heads of the Office in Serbia or the heads of the negotiating team in Pristina," Vladisavljev tells Kosovo Online.

He points out that the dialogue, after some momentum at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, did not bring concrete results in the implementation of what was agreed upon in Brussels and Ohrid, and that the lack of progress was also caused by changes at the administrative level due to elections in Brussels, as well as the upcoming elections in Washington.

"But we must not forget that just before Trump's departure, one of the last efforts came from Washington as an attempt to produce concrete policies on the international stage. Now there are three months left until the American elections, and it remains to be seen whether the administration will attempt to push through some elements of agreement implementation during that period, or if we will be in a sort of limbo until the elections in Kosovo are completed and potentially a new administration takes office in the US," Vladisavljev says.

He adds that concrete progress from the actors in Pristina and Belgrade should not be expected because, although there is a tacit agreement on paper, the implementation has been lacking due to both international aspects and the absence of active will among domestic actors to implement the elements of the agreement.