A vacancy has arisen, position available forŠPresident

By Jerina Zaloshnja
It’s final! President Alfred Moisiu will not be running for a second term in the upcoming months when the Albanian Assembly will have to elect a new Head of State for a five year presidential term. Although there has been no official declaration of Mr. Moisiu or his Cabinet, the latest political developments imply that Moisiu does not at all appear to be inclined towards another term in oiffice. The reason is now a public secret. Institutional relations between the government, but also between the Assembly and the President’s Office are almost non existent. There have now been a number of government decrees and initiatives which President Moisiu has not only failed to support but he has rejected them. In this context, the decision of the Ruling Majority of the Centre-Right to replace the General Prosecutor, or to replace members of the Higher Council of Justic; candidates for Ambassadorial postings proposed by the Government have not only failed to find the approval of the President, but it is now a known fact, they were rejected. Moreover, Government members have publicly articulated successive and serious allegations against the President and his institution. Without even analyzing these allegations, it has become perfectly clear that any normal functioning of relations between the fundamental institutions of the State, the Government, the Assembly and the Presidency, is out of the question. It would seem that this situation makes the idea of a bid for a second term by Mr. Moisiu nigh on impossible. The absence of cooperation and the profound discord became blaringly obvious to the public once again with the reshuffle of the Government and the requirement for the President of the Republic to decree the new Ministers. President Moisiu decreed the new Ministers of the Berisha Government at the very last moments of the constitutional deadline. From the legal point of view, the act of the President to decree the new Cabinet members only moments before they became automatically decreed is perfectly normal. However, from the political viewpoint, decreeing at the last moment is overstepping the Law. It appears that the President refused any change of his planned agenda, centered around a ceremony to promote a book written by the Croatian President Mesic,- an undertaking that would have been more appropriate for a University or some other such institution to have dealt with, rather that the President of the Republic; decorating the Croatian President and, of course, the meetings, lunches and dinners with him. Certainly, the President was also busy with other commitments during the week, but President Mesic’s visit was the main event, although Stipe Mesic was in Albania in a private capacity and not as the Head of the Croatian State. It is as plain as day that the deferral of decreeing the new government members to the absolute last legal boundary in time had nothing to do with the President’s agenda. What agenda could possibly be more important to a President than decreeing the Government? The decision to put the decreeing off until the very last moment when there was almost no requirement for the President any longer was purely political. And this reflects an open and irreconcilable opposition to the Government. This means that both sides, the Government and the President have reached the decision that neither party will be talking about a second Moisiu presidential term.
So if Mr. Moisiu is both excluded and self – excluded from the race, who will the future President be? Like every other position there must be criteria for the post of President too. Although still early days, and although it is neither good ethics or of any particular use for that matter, the Government and the Opposition have already proclaimed their criteria. The only “criteria” on which the Opposition insists, at least so far, is that the President must be elected by consensus. And it appears that by “consensus” the Opposition means that the candidate be from the Left. Conceived as such, this cannot be a consensus, but a condition. For its part, it looks as though the Government has taken the process one step further by introducing its candidate Mr. Bamir Topi. And according to the Government this is its candidate who genuinely enjoys broadest consensus. However, as we said earlier on, as for every other application for a position, all the criteria made public, or, in our case implied, have the aim of giving the job- even more so when we are talking about the Head of State- to the candidate who has the highest potential of discharging this duty. Will this be the consensus to elect the new President, in other words, will the Government and the Opposition reach a consensus on criteria?