Kosovo got a president at the last minute: 81 votes, just one more than needed

Kosovo's parliament elected economist Justina Shiroka Pula as the country's president - in the first minutes of Wednesday, literally before the constitutional deadline ran out. Of 120 MPs, 81 voted for her. 80 were needed. A single vote stood between Pristina and new snap parliamentary elections, just like the ones in June.

"This mandate doesn't belong to just one person. It belongs to our citizens. I will be the president of all citizens," Shiroka Pula said after the vote. A nice sentence. In the Balkans we hear it after almost every vote - it's harder to see how long it lasts.

The price of the votes

The majority didn't come from a sudden burst of enthusiasm for the candidate. It came from a deal between Prime Minister Albin Kurti's party, Vetëvendosje, and the opposition Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) - a deal to limit the powers of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague. In other words: the president was voted in, and the bargain was struck at the expense of the court that tries war crimes.

In Pristina this is no abstract legal matter. On 16 September the Hague court sentenced former Kosovo president Hashim Thaçi and three other defendants to a combined 81 years in prison for war crimes committed during the war for independence from Serbia in the late 1990s. On Monday police used tear gas and water cannon against protesters demanding exactly these changes. Critics argue the sentences the court hands down are too harsh.

So the street wanted less Hague, the parties made a deal around exactly that - and parliament, at the last minute, got a president. How many times have we watched Balkan institutions rescue themselves five minutes before midnight, with a deal nobody voted for at an election?

Kosovo's presidency is largely ceremonial, but for years it has been a source of political deadlock: election requires a two-thirds majority in parliament, and the parties struggle to agree on a candidate.

Shiroka Pula was born in 1953, is president of the Kosovo Academy of Sciences and Arts and a professor of economics. From 2008 to 2011 she was minister of economy. An academic at the head of a state where Hague verdicts bring people onto the streets - on paper, that sounds like a calming choice. Whether it really is, the next crisis will show.