A new electoral code requested by small political parties

TIRANA, Aug 11 – The head of the Central Elections Commission Arben Ristani says that he would not be against a total change of the new electoral code, but only of some of its practices.
The smaller political parties have raised their voice that the new regional proportional electoral system should change into a new total national proportional system.
Those that can make this possible seem to be of different opinions. The governing Democratic Party and main opposition Socialist party are reluctant to speak at the moment whether they are in favor of amending a new law they made themselves in a rare compromise in the country’s politics.
All the small political parties say the new electoral code confirmed what they feared – they were almost all excluded from the country’s political life at parliament.
Besides the two big parties – the Socialist Movement for Integration has four seats, the Republican one and the Justice and Integration party will be present at the new parliament.
That has left aside many other smaller but well-known political groupings like the Christian Democrats, Democratic Alliance, Social Democracy, Social Democrats and many others.
Their voice has been intensifying and raised in intensity recently when they also learned they have to pay back to the government the money used during the electoral campaign, a result of not winning enough votes to enter the parliament.
True that the amount of money owed cannot be much compared to the two big parties but it is a major amount of money for these smaller parties.
If they do not pay back the fixed amounts to the state budget they are, by law, not allowed to run in the next elections in the next five years.
In total they must pay back 12.7 million leks (about 100,000 euros). Unless they are paid back by end of August they will also not be funded for the next five years.