Coalition negotiations in Kosovo experienced a fresh blow on Wednesday evening when Lumir Abdixhiku, leader of the opposition Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK, announced that he is suspending talks with the ruling Vetevendosje party amid a crisis within his own party.

Abdixhiku has been under fire from senior party figures demanding he step down after June 7 election results, which showed a slight increase in votes for the party but not enough to escape third place, behind Albin Kurti’s Vetevendosje and the Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK.

Calls for Abdixhiku’s ousting were formalised on Wednesday when two party officials submitted a list of 148 signatures in order to summon a party convention that would hold a vote of confidence in him.

“Because of this initiative, I am obliged to interrupt all my activities for the formation of institutions which [citizens] have rightly expected for a long time,” Abdixhiku said in a video message.

“Under these circumstances, it would be neither serious not responsible for me to carry on with negotiation on behalf of the LDK as long as my mandate to lead and represent is being put into question within my house,” he added.

The LDK statute says one-third of the party delegates must initiate a motion to dismiss the leader. With 355 delegates in total, a congress may be called with 118 signatures, or more.

His announcement came minutes after Koha news website reported that Kurti and Abdixhiku had tied a coalition agreement “in principle” to put an end to a year-long political crisis which led to three parliamentary elections within 16 months.

The agreement, which would give the LDK the position of Deputy Prime Minister and three ministries, was denied by the LDK’s spokesperson in a statement for the Prishtina-based media outlet TV21. Vetevendosje, which would reportedly take the President’s post under the terms of the deal, has not confirmed or denied the agreement yet.

LDK’s Internal Rift Raises Questions Over Party’s Future Leadership

A potential vote of confidence in Abdixhiku comes only months after he barely survived another one at a congress held after the December 28 snap elections, in which the party returned to a historic low of 13 per cent – the same as in 2021 – and despite a slight increase to 16.7 per cent in the June elections.

The LDK is Kosovo’s oldest political party, formed at the dawn of pluralism in ex-Yugoslavia in December 1989. Under its first leader, Ibrahim Rugova, the party led a decade of non-violent resistance to Serbian rule, creating a system of parallel government and education after Albanians were ousted from public-sector jobs by the regime of Slobodan Milosevic.

Rugova’s pacific policy was eclipsed by the armed Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, in the late-1990s. In 1999, NATO intervened with air strikes to drive Serbian forces out of Kosovo. The LDK bounced back, however, in the first postwar local elections, in 2000.

Rugova died in 2006, however, after which the LDK struggled. The PDK was in power when Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 with the backing of the major Western powers, before Vetevendosje emerged to dominate the political scene in last six years.

In the June 7 elections, Vetevendosje won 53 of the 120 seats, down four from the last December 2025 election. The second biggest party, the PDK, remained on 22. The LDK won three more seats than in December 2025, taking 18. The Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, AAK, won seven seats.