By Albert Rakipi
Almost all sessions of parliament since the June 23 elections have ended in verbal conflict, accusations, insults and charges using profane and extreme language which is quite unfortunate for the democracy Albania is trying to build.
Over the past six to seven months, one can’t think of a single parliamentary session that can be remembered for even resembling a normal political debate that is cultured and that comes with different ideas and arguments made with a passion or that show any sort of love for the leadership positions these members of parliament have been trusted with.
The parliament has instead become an arena of discord, insults and endless accusations done in the type of language that is embarrassing for ordinary Albanians, the ones who built this parliament with their votes.
This type of banal and unacceptable behavior is not just an ethical issue. Parliament’s job is to make good laws for the country not to become an arena of conflict. Yet, it happens every Thursday, when scheduled parliamentary sessions take place – and every day when the talking heads of the parties, both in government and opposition take to the airwaves. It is a growing political conflict in an environment that seems trapped in conflict and which inhibits the country’s normal development. This political conflict and the negative energies it emits are overshadowing the hopes of Albanians for a country that changes for the better. Political conflict in Albania is already eroding the confidence of citizens in politics, their faith in democracy as a proper political system – but perhaps most importantly, it is hurting their confidence in the future in their own country.
Certainly, political conflict in post-communist Albania nothing new. Rather, the conflict has been and continues to be a way to shape policies in Albania, if not the main instrument to do so.
Hopes that conflict and deep political disagreements between the parties would be simply a passing feature of the political transition are rapidly fading. The uncompromising struggle for power, lack of consensus and the absence of any cooperation between the losers and winners (the zero-sum game mentality in which the winner takes all and the loser loses all) appears now to be a basic, stable and permanent political feature in Albania.
Why does this continue to happen? The first answer relates to the political culture that lacks balanced competition and with political party interests that don’t fit with the spirit of cooperation with political opponents. Albania is a country where the liberal tradition is very young and episodic, not to mention almost total lack of democratic experience.
Instead, it seems that in the minds of political leaders in Albania today, the the legacy of the previous Stalinist regime is very much alive. Beyond this theoretical explanation, the political conflict over the past 20 years of political transition has been rooted in electoral processes that have been very controversial and in many cases have fallen outside international standards. The history of political elections in Albania is generally a history of endless political contestations, which at times have ended in serious crisis for the country and society.
The most recent case came after the election of 2009, when the Socialist Party boycotted for a long time parliament refusing to accept DP’s win for a second term.
But the June 23 elections had a clear winner, or at least a clear loser, says Remzi Lani of the Albanian Media Institute. The loser, even though it has accepted the outcome of the election, seems paradoxically to not have conceded defeat and is difficult to reconcile with the fact that it is in opposition.
Earlier more quietly and now more publicly, the DP has hinted that the electoral process, although recognized, has been stolen. It sees the roots of this in the Socialist Movement for Integration, a former partner in the ruling coalition with the Democrats. SMI quadrupled the number of deputies in parliament in the last election. These extraordinary results came just two months after it left government. They also cast a strong doubt about the value that Albanians put in their votes and the democratic system, because they have raised many assumptions, including vote buying, but neither international observers nor the Democratic Party have presented any evidence of outright rigging in the results.
If election results have been accepted and archived, then why does the Democratic Party not accept defeat? For more than six months in parliament and outside parliament, it is challenging everything, not recognizing any decision of the government and seeing everything the government does as bad.
Only within the past four-five months, the opposition Democratic Party has had some some extraordinary victories, after a number of important government decisions were overthrown by the constitutional court or other tribunals after the DP took the matter to the courts.
But desire and action to oppose and reject anything that government does takes away the focus on important things like these legal victories in defense of the Constitution and rule of law.
The DP is implying that only the return of the Democrats to power can improve things in the country. This is not a far-sighted policy or a reflection on deep loss in last year’s elections . Although DP officially has a new leader at its helm, the previous leader, Sali Berisha, has not yet made his role clear in the future of the Democratic Party. This uncertainty helps simply preserve the status quo and the same hierarchy of power within the Democratic Party, when the election of Lulzim Basha at the helm was expected to bring profound changes.
In particular, a new approach was needed, one that is modern, competitive, with new ideas, but also with new faces, without neglecting any moment to fight the opposition in defense of the Constitution, laws, democratic procedures.
Despite the resignation of the former leader, center of power seems to be falling back on Mr. Berisha
“It seems that there is a conflict within the Democratic Party. The new leader, Basha, has a more European image in the eyes of the public eye than the previous leadership, and it seems clear that he must face certain groups from the old guard that prefer a more radical and unrefined communication, which in itself puts sticks in the wheels of the project for the recovery of the Democratic Party, which can not avoid the fact that lost the support of a large group of voters in the elections last year,” says Andi Balla of the Tirana Center for Journalistic Excellence.
While the opposition excludes and rejects everything the government says or does, on the other hand, in some cases the government, even the prime minister himself has publicly recognized the contribution of the previous government of Prime Minister Sali Berisha and especially for a number of important issues. If both major parties will go with sincerity towards accepting each other’s contributions, this would be an important step in the modernization of Albanian politics and its maturity. Unfortunately this does not seem to happen.
Rather, the spirit of conflict in the country increased with charges that are serious and laughable at the same time, as the opposition accused the government of allowing the use of military facilities for international drug trafficking.
The same deals with beating one’s chest for amounts of drugs several times larger seized by the present government in comparison with the low quantities seized by the previous government. It is a bitter race to blame opponent and an official record for hurting the image of Albania .
However, there is no doubt that the conflict is also a tango and thus requires a partner. What role is played by government in the current conflict, which increasingly is going to extremes? Or what answer can be given to the question that makes the German Ambassador to Tirana, Hellmut Hoffmann: “Will the new government stop the unfortunate practice of the past of treating the public service as party property – i.e. purge it and put party loyalists, sometimes even without proper job qualifications, into positions?”
As we know, the normative act of the government , which delayed the entry into force of the Law on Civil Servants, was voided by the Constitutional Court, but there is already data on departures from the administration to create jobs for party activists, sometimes even the ones with criminal records.
But the government and the opposition are not in conflict only for the public administration or similar issues. Look at what happens with the new project of the main boulevard in Tirana. During the three – four months, construction work for the new boulevard in Tirana arena involved even physical clashes between municipal police, controlled by the Democrats and national construction inspectorate, controlled by the Socialists. To keep the conflict alive, political parties and their leaders seem to have their short-term political interests, but the losers are the citizens and the country’s development. The case of the boulevard is a vivid demonstration of how political conflict hinders new job openings and development of the country.
The roles have been reversed in the past. The current prime minister was himself Tirana mayor in the past. The central government, then controlled by Democrats, froze a number of projects by the local government (Skanderbeg Square remained for several years as a derelict site, for example). Now that the roles have reversed, are the Socialists doing the same thing they did when Democrats were in power? The response from both camps would be extreme and unfortunately lacking moderate voices within the party or independent voices outside parties that are needed to answer the question.
But the fundamental question is why even after twenty years of political conflict, leaders in Tirana, as well as in Brussels and Strasbourg are still working on what can be done to stop the political conflict in Albania.
