Kosovo may finally get a president. After nearly two years in which its institutions ran on empty, the party of caretaker prime minister Albin Kurti and the opposition LDK have agreed to back a joint candidate. If the deal holds, the deadlock that kept the country stuck is over.

The proposed candidate is Bekim Sejdiu, a 51-year-old law professor at the University of Pristina. He previously served as Kosovo's ambassador to Turkey and consul general in New York. The post he is getting is largely ceremonial, which is the point of the story in itself: two years were spent on a job with no executive power.

The arithmetic that kept the country stuck

Kurti's party holds 53 of 120 parliamentary seats. The LDK has 18 and is the third largest. For a government, Kurti is short only a handful of MPs from the minority parties. For a president, however, a two-thirds majority is needed - 80 votes - and that number was the wall every attempt so far ran into.

Together with the minority parties, the two sides can now assemble those 80 votes. "We hope and believe that the Republic of Kosovo, as it has done many times in the past, will again find a way to move forward and face the great challenges ahead of us," Sejdiu said at a press conference after the deal.

The 7 June vote was the third national election in under 18 months, and it was held precisely because a president could not be elected. That entire electoral machine turned around one post with no executive power. The cost was borne by citizens, not by the parties that failed to agree.

Kosovo is among the poorest countries in Europe and wants EU membership. Brussels has repeated more than once that without stable institutions there are no reforms, and without reforms there is neither money nor progress. Political instability blocked both directly.

The sessions at which a parliamentary speaker is to be elected, the new government confirmed and the head of state voted in have not yet been scheduled. The deal exists, the date does not. In the Balkans, that is a gap that can last for months.