Albin Kurti
Albin Kurti was prime minister of Kosovo for fifty-one days in 2020 and from March 2021 to 2025, and has been the caretaker since. He was the student leader of the 1997 protests against Milošević's closure of the Albanian university who was arrested in April 1999 during the NATO bombing, sentenced by a Serbian court to fifteen years for endangering the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia, and released in December 2001 under Koštunica's amnesty. He came home to found Vetëvendosje, Self-Determination, in 2005 as a movement against the UN administration and the negotiations with Belgrade, throwing eggs and tear gas in the parliament, spending months in prison. It won, at the election of February 2021, fifty per cent of the vote in a country that had never given anyone thirty. The government has been the quarrel with Serbia and with the Western capitals over the Serb-majority north, where he sent the special police to install ethnic Albanian mayors elected by four per cent of the voters in May 2023, after which NATO peacekeepers were injured in riots. The European Union suspended its financial support. The Serbian paramilitaries attacked a police patrol at Banjska in September 2023 and killed an officer. The government closed the Serbian-run post offices, banks, municipalities and dinar payments one by one. By 2025 the north was integrated and its Serbs were leaving. He was born in Pristina in 1975, studied computer engineering at the university, and was the students' spokesman at twenty-two. He served two years of the Serbian sentence in Lipjan and Niš. He refused the Ahtisaari plan of 2007 as a sovereignty with conditions. He refused the Brussels agreement of 2013 and the association of Serb municipalities it promised. In office he has refused them still. The Ohrid agreement of February 2023 that his own government accepted on paper requires the association he says is a Republika Srpska. The election of February 2025 gave his party forty-two per cent and no majority. The parliament could not elect a speaker for seven months, so that the country went into 2026 with a caretaker and a second election. He has lifted the minimum wage, the pensions and the public payroll, and taken the corruption indices down. He has told the Americans and the Europeans that Kosovo is a state and not a protectorate, which they have not entirely accepted.
- Lived: 1975 CE – ?
- Nationality: Kosovar
- Roles: prime minister, activist, politician
