Kosovo has gone through a difficult period of political difficulties as a result of weak political culture of compromise. During the 2025 electoral campaign, BIRN reported that Kosovo’s election campaign was marked by hate speech, disinformation and dehumanising abuse, including cases where opponents were compared to animals, described as mentally incompetent, or labelled as Serbian spies. The Election Complaints and Appeals Panel found political parties responsible for 30 incidents of hate speech, while fact-checkers identified at least 100 cases of disinformation on election day. Reuters reported that the December 2025 election came after a long impasse, with parliament left non-functional and around €1 billion in funding delayed.
The current polarization in Kosovo is often seen through the lens of the “bad blood” among the more traditional political parties in Kosovo that dominated the post-war statebuilding process and the new political elite that emerged after the independence of Kosovo. This paper argues that the deeper issue is the way politics in Kosovo has become organised around blocking the other side. Disagreements are common among political parties in every democracy. That is normal. The issues for Kosovo is when disagreement turns into hostility that undermines Kosovo’s core national interests, because compromise is seen as weakness, and when public institutions are used to deny the other side any political success, even when the entire country seems to be “paying the price” (failed bid for membership in the Council of Europe, etc.).
It is also important to note that the paper does not argue that political disagreement should disappear. Kosovo needs strong debate and real opposition. But the country also needs predictability and institutions that make cooperation possible on issues of national interest. The main task is simple to say, perhaps but challenging to implement, which is to make blocking less rewarding, make cooperation less costly.