PRISTINA, Oct 7 (Reuters) – Kosovo’s parliament elected economist Justina Shiroka Pula as the country’s largely ceremonial president just before a constitutional deadline, avoiding another snap election in one of the poorest countries in Europe.
She received 81 votes, one more than she needed, in the 120-seat parliament in the early minutes of Wednesday. Failure to elect a new president would have triggered snap parliamentary elections in the Balkan country, as it did in June.
“This mandate does not belong to just one person. It belongs to our citizens… I will be the president of all citizens,” Shiroka Pula said after the vote.
Shiroka Pula’s election followed a deal between the ruling Vetevendosje party of Prime Minister Albin Kurti and opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo to limit the powers of a Kosovo war crimes court in The Hague.
Police fired tear gas and used water cannon on Monday to disperse demonstrators demanding the changes be approved. Critics have asserted the Hague court’s punishments are too harsh.
The court on September 16 sentenced former President Hashim Thaci and three others to a combined 81 years in prison for war crimes during the territory’s violent break from Serbia in 1998-1999.
The presidency is mainly ceremonial in Kosovo but has often been a source of political instability because a two-thirds parliamentary majority is needed to elect a president and parties have struggled to agree on a candidate.
Shiroka Pula, born in 1953, is the president of Kosovo’s Academy of Sciences and Arts and an economics professor who served as minister of the economy between 2008 and 2011.
(Reporting by Fatos Bytyci; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
