Weekly Analysis
Mounting Pressures Test Regional Institutional Capacities
WBC Staff - 3 Mar 2026
Weekly Analysis
WBC Staff
Between Feb. 24 and March 2, institutional stress and political volatility marked the dynamics in the Western Balkans.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama sought to blunt protest pressure by reshuffling his Cabinet and dismissing his deputy, Belinda Ballaku, whose corruption probe has been the driver of violent demonstrations since December. With the move, Rama appears to be attempting to manage the protests through controlled concessions without addressing the public’s core grievances. Meanwhile, Kosovo is heading toward a presidential election deadline that will test its institutional capacities after a year of political impasse. Without Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s endorsement, President Vjosa Osmani’s re-election is not guaranteed. Kurti’s candidate selection strategy will reveal whether he is willing to risk another impasse to engineer a coalition favorable to his interests or whether he will prioritize stabilization that strengthens Kosovo’s institutions.
In Serbia, sustained demonstrations broadened over the last week as farmers and lawyers initiated strikes, further widening the regime’s governance burden. At the same time, President Aleksandar Vučić’s diplomatic outreach showed continued hedging in an effort to balance Russia and the West short of a genuine strategic realignment.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, entity competition has now moved decisively into the media landscape, with Bosnia’s sole state-level public broadcaster, BHRT, pushed toward impending shutdown amid funding issues. As financial obstruction and entity noncompliance degrade state capacities, Bosnia may soon be stripped of its few remaining integrative public institutions.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama made seven changes to his Cabinet, the most notable being the dismissal of Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Ballaku, who he had tried for months to protect politically amid sustained anti-corruption protests.
Rama also appointed new faces to head the ministries of Justice, Energy and Infrastructure, Defense, Parliamentary Relations, and Foreign Affairs.
Albana Koçiu, who had been serving as Minister of the Interior, replaced Ballaku as Rama’s deputy. Notably, in September 2025, she fired her deputy minister, Andi Mahila, following reports of his illegally smoking in a closed bar. The demonstration of Koçiu’s willingness to take decisive action to enforce accountability following a minor infraction marks her as a safe choice for Rama that seemingly departs from the corruption scandals that plagued Ballaku’s term.
At the same time, Koçiu demonstrated her loyalty to the current Rama-led government, condemning the current protests against the prime minister and accusing Democratic Party leader Sali Berisha of turning the party and subsequent mobilization of protestors into a “a squad of arsonists” most recently seen in protestors lighting former villa of Enver Hoxh, Albania’s former communist dictator on fire.
Motives for this reshuffle, therefore, are best understood amid ongoing protests calling for Rama’s resignation. Through promoting the appearance of corrective action, Rama is seeking to deescalate public dissatisfaction and seize the narrative by reframing corruption scandals as accountability reforms. Concurrently, replacing liabilities with known loyalists allows Rama to preserve the governing coalition's cohesion while ignoring core grievances driving the public protests.
Kosovo must elect a president before March 5, as dictated by the constitutional deadline that mandates a successor must be elected no later than 30 days before the end of the current president's term. Yet, only days before the deadline, no official candidate has been proposed to parliament, underscoring the depth of elite bargaining and the fragility of procedural certainty.
President Vjosa Osmani’s re-election is thus not guaranteed, despite her ambitions to serve a second five-year term. In fact, Prime Minister Albin Kurti has withheld explicit endorsement of Osmani, citing uncertainty that she could garner the 80 parliamentary votes necessary for her reelection. Kurti’s approach is notable given Osmani’s support for Kurti last year during Kosovo’s political deadlock in which Kurti failed to receive the majority needed for nomination as prime minister.
This discrepancy underscores the presidential elections as a stress test for Pristina’s institutional capabilities: whether a president can be elected without dissolving parliament and sending Kosovo back to parliamentary elections for the third time since Feb. 2025, as well as provide an accountability check on executive power consolidation. Kurti has significant control over candidate selection, and his handling of the process will be particularly revealing. Kurti’s candidate of choice will show whether he is willing to build a coalition favorable to his position even at the cost of a renewed political stalemate or engage in coalition-building that stabilizes Kosovo’s democratic institutional capacity.
Serbia's protest cycle is extending into sectoral strikes against President Aleksandar Vučić’s government. Farmers have reportedly blocked roads in protest, demanding higher subsidies, protection from cheap imported products, and faster payments for their crops. Similarly, lawyers went on strike to protest a set of amendments that risk undermining the judiciary’s independence and weakening anticorruption efforts. This signals that public discontent is increasingly institutional and professionalized rather than purely oppositional.
Externally, Vučić’s foreign diplomacy continues to favor hedging over realignment. Belgrade may be seeking to deepen nuclear energy cooperation with Russia, given Vučić’s meeting with Rosatom Director General Alexey Likhachev. The potential expansion counters Serbia’s efforts to diversify reliance on Russia’s energy sector amid pressure of U.S. sanctions on Serbian energy giant Naftna Industrija Srbije, majority-owned by Russia’s Gazprom Neft. This development indicates that Belgrade is trimming dependence on Moscow only when costs are imposed.
In parallel, Vučić’s meeting with Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev on expanding trade and economic ties, coupled with explicit gratitude for Astana’s decision not to recognize Kosovo, demonstrates Serbia’s continued pursuit of a multivector foreign policy that balances Russia and the West. Kazakhstan, which like Serbia possesses historical and cultural ties with Russia, is pursuing the same balancing strategy, making it a strategic partner for expanding Serbia’s international relations, particularly within Central Asia. The meeting also demonstrates the growing confidence of emerging regional actors to expand bilateral partnerships on their own terms.
These developments show that Serbia continues to wrestle with a dual-front problem. Domestically, the expansion of protests into key sectors raises the economic and administrative price of contention. Internationally, Belgrade continues on the path of expanding its options without committing to a strategic pivot – an attempt to preserve autonomy while maintaining selective external linkages, particularly those to Russia, that deliver political and diplomatic leverage and energy-security benefits.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s state-level broadcaster, BHRT, halted all programing except news due to accumulated debt. This operational breakdown underscores how entity competition continues to degrade core state capacities.
Under Bosnia’s postwar funding model, money to operate the BHRT comes from license fees collected through electricity bills across both entities. BHRT’s debt accumulated amid the refusal of RTRS, an entity-level broadcaster in Republica Srpska (RS), to pay its dues. Specifically, RTRS, defying nearly a dozen court orders, has not transferred tax money since 2017 and now owes more than $62.96 million. Many Croats also refuse to pay license fees.
While both entities have their own broadcasting channels, BHRT, as the sole national broadcaster, has served as one of the few integrative institutions in Bosnia, helping to counter fragmentation and nationalist messaging. The fiscal morass that drives BHRT’s paralysis demonstrates the extent to which entity competition and selective noncompliance can erode state capacities without formal political or constitutional ruptures. At the same time, officials in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina entity (FBiH) have urged the Office of the High Representative (OHR) to intervene to prevent BHRT’s impeding collapse. This appeal reflects the BHRT’s political salience, but most notably, it shows Bosnia’s chronic reliance on OHR to resolve deadlocks and crises that domestic institutions fail to resolve.
Crucially, BHRT’s current difficulties risk escalating into a full shutdown – a development that would leave Bosnia as the only European country without a national broadcaster. BHRT’s shutdown would have an outsized societal impact because it would remove one of the few remaining state-level platforms for shared public information and risk further polarizing the audiences along ethnonational lines.
This week’s developments showed political leaders increasingly responding to pressures through tactics that preserve space for maneuvering. In Albania, Rama’s Cabinet reshuffling emerged as a substitute for reform, while the pressure of Kosovo’s impending presidential election deadline may afford Kurti an opportunity for coalition engineering. As Serbia’s protests spill into key sectors’ strikes, Vučić continues to pursue diplomacy that sustains strategic ambiguity. And in Bosnia, RS fiscal obstruction and noncompliance are degrading state institutions, underscoring the extent to which RS has normalized institutional attrition as an instrument of power.
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