TIRANA TIMES EDITORIAL
Tirana, June 14 – After a lot of drama and several voting rounds, Albania finally has a new president. Regardless of what this editorial outlines below, Bujar Nishani’s election as president is within the bounds of the constitution. The former interior minister is among the moderate figures withing the ruling Democratic Party and as a minister he has shown respect for the law and the state. What remains to be seen is how Mr. Nishani’s presidential administration will handle working with a prime minister who has pushed hard for the past 20 years to seize as much power as he can from institutions he doesn’t control directly. This has certainly been true with Mr. Berisha behavior with presidents when he served as prime minister and with prime ministers when he was leader of a distributive opposition.
President-elect Nishani will soon be Albania’s head of state. As a minister, to a certain extent, he has had the support of the public and the opposition. Now, Mr. Nishani will have to have courage to properly serve as head of state and whether he will resist the prime minister’s wish to meddle in the affairs of the new presidency.
Mr. Nishani was not a consensual candidate, however, and it is unfortunate the Albanian political class clearly demonstrated it lacks the capacity and willingness to build consensus on important issues. Short-term political interests, some purely individual, triumphed in the presidential selection process.
The parliamentary majority in general and the prime minister in particular were consistent in their attempt to appoint an easily-controlled figure like Artan Hoxha to the presidency, following the withdrawal of the first candidate, Judge Xhezair Zaganjori. The opposition, civil society groups and journalists had an extremely negative reaction to Mr. Hoxha’s candidacy, primarily as a person who could easily be controlled by the prime minister. That’s even before allegations of Mr. Hoxha’s old ties with the Sigurimi, Albania’s feared communist secret service. If these were true, a Hoxha administration would be disastrous because he would not be able to perform the role independently, and the entire institution would be humiliated.
Yet, the entire process of selecting a candidates shows the almost primitive level of how politics work in this country – leaving aside any notion of democracy. The presidency as an institution based on the constitution. It is not a government department, but this time the Albanian politicians, and we are speaking here primarily about the prime minister, who brought to the table candidates through which he could control, weaken and/or neutralize the institution of the presidency. In particular, Mr. Hoxha’s candidacy, which ended with withdrawal just a few minutes before the parliamentary vote was to take place, was a humiliation for the presidency as an institution but also for the so-called Albanian civil society and the research institutes it comes with. Mr. Hoxha had studied mining, and claims to be an expert on the country’s economy, but so far has yet to publish anything that relates to the economy. What he had written plenty about was unscrupulously protecting the government and Prime Minister Sali Berisha himself in the press, using blatant lies and serving as advocate for the government in television and newspapers.
A key role in this entire process appears to have been played by Socialist Movement for Integration head Ilir Meta. Only a few months after his corruption-related court case was dismissed as key evidence, a hidden camera video, was deemed as not proof, Mr. Meta now appears to be the man of dialogue and of the future. It is unfortunate when the personal political future of Mr. Meta is tied to the future on the entire country.
Mr. Meta did not fulfill his commitment to have a consensual candidate, in a sense humiliating Opposition leader Edi Rama, but also hurting the hopes of Albanians who wanted to see all parties work together in order to have a head of state that is that is a dignified statesman accepted by wall. dignified. It is not clear what Mr. Meta got in return for electing a president without the consent of the opposition, but there was clearly something in it for him and his party.
But it is also important to point out that the election of the new president also showed the Socialist opposition’s inability to provide political leadership – primarily with constitutional changes done with its consent in 2007 – and reflected now with its inability to force the election of a president that represents all Albanians.
At the end of the day, perhaps the worse thing to come out of the election, is that Albania’s political class, particularly those in power, showed to the EU that at this point personal power is more important than advancing the country’s EU bid. A consensual president was not one of the 12 requirements to get candidate status, but Brussels had made it clear, a consensual president would indicate Albania has the enlightened leadership required for a future EU member. In that aspect, Tirana has utterly failed.
