TIRANA TIMES EDITORIAL
The hopes of an orderly and sedate electoral process of Albania’s upcoming parliamentary elections are fading as the country’s key political forces are again at each-others’ throats.
The country’s two top political leaders, Prime Minister Sali Berisha and Opposition Leader Edi Rama, are back to their old tricks, and Albania now faces a stalemate that could do irreparable damage to the trust people have in the electoral system.
As things stand, the government is using every trick in the book to legally get away from having to compromise with the opposition and from having to lose any control on key parts of the election administration.
In return, the Albanian opposition has returned to its notorious stance of boycotting all institutions it sees to be unfairly influenced by the government.
In the process everyone loses, and the electoral process becomes marred.
Events have quickly precipitated since an agreement reformulated the opposition bringing together the Socialist Party with the Socialist Movement for Integration, which for nearly four years kept the government afloat with its support.
SMI had a seat in the Central Electoral Commission, and it switching sides meant the opposition would have the majority vote in the commission. The ruling Democratic Party said it wanted to remove the SMI member from CEC and replacing him with one of its own allies, a move aimed to restore balance to CEC, which is nominally independent, but which in practice is political with the ruling and opposition parties proposing and controlling members based on a formula designed to give governing parties a majority.
Being on thin legal ice, since CEC members are designed by law to be hard to replace because it is supposed to be an independent institution, the Democrats found a pretext: the member’s supposed shady record of having been sacked for bad conduct in 20o3 when he served as a regional prosecutor.
The opposition then likely told its representatives in the CEC to resign, though officially they “did so preserve the integrity of the commission.” It now says it won’t nominate replacements, which would freeze the work of CEC, though technically it can continue operating without having those two seats filled. (Another opposition member from a smaller party says he will boycott future proceedings without resigning.)
While claiming that it is protesting the political interference on the side of government, the opposition is in fact using its own political methods to pursue its aims.
The problem is that when people who are unfamiliar with how things work in Albania read the rules they see CEC as independent. It is not. It has never been. Authorities need to stop pretending that is the case.
In fact, the legacy of governance in Albania since 2005 has been one where independent institutions exist only legally, and whoever is in power controls everything or tries to control everything.
In the past eight years the Democratic-led government has been relentless in its aim to fill independent institution with its own followers – starting with the president of the country, a supposed symbol of national unity.
But the CEC issue is more poignant because Albanians’ trust in the elections is weak as it is. There is already a movement in social circles called “white ballot” urging people to go the polls and purposefully make their votes invalid. That would be tragic for Albania’s democracy at this point since would only be rewarding the political class that had done everything it can to weaken this country’s democracy and independent institutions.
If anything, this latest CEC crisis highlighted problems at the core of Albania’s democracy.
The CEC members replacement vote came at the end of a marathon session of parliament. It involved rebel opposition MPs being threatened by their colleagues to change their vote in front of television cameras.
Some argue Albania’s electoral code itself threatens the country’s democracy because members of parliament are not accountable to the voters but rather only to the two political leaders who essentially decide who gets elected because they have full power on candidate lists the voters have to vote on without any input.
This creates tension within parties and disloyalty to voters.
For the record, Opposition Leader Rama and Prime Minister Berisha were the chief architects of the electoral code.
