Albanian politics – Will the past have the final say?

By Jerina Zaloshnja
“How much did the latest MP to join your party cost you?” This was the question that an Albanian journalist put to the Chairman of the Albanian Demo-Christian Party Nard Ndoka, current Minister of Health. The party this Minister belongs to, which has just been joined by a new MP who broke away from the Socialist Party, is truly a most rare phenomenon in politics. Today the DCP has nine seats in the Parliament. This is a party which has grown larger within the parliament. From the one seat it won in the 2005 general elections, this party has increased its seats ten fold, and its Chairman is even declaring that MPs from other parties have expressed the wish to join the DCP. As soon as this party grew in numbers, Ndoka forced the Prime Minister to give him a Cabinet post and he got one of the best posts, Minister of Health. Nard Ndoka, who set out in his working career as a mechanic, currently Chairman of the DCP, is now Minister of Health. His Deputy in the Party, a medical doctor by profession is the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. The posts kept coming and the greed and envy increased with the growth of the number of seats this party manages to acquire in the Parlaiment. What is the attraction for MPs of other parties to join the DCP? This is not the only strange phenomenon in Albanian politics. Phantom parties which never managed to reach the 2.5 per cent threshold on their own, have become giant parties within the Albanian Parliament. For example, the Republican Party, astonished everyone in the last parliamentary elections of 2005, when, thanks to the Dushke Scheme it managed to come out as the number one party in the country with 23 per cent of the votes in the proportional and now has a dozen MPs.
Another party the Environmentalist Agrarian Party (AEP), which had been on the Left for 8 years prior to the 2005 elections, jumped slightly to the Right in 2005 and is now Centre-Right. This party has never been able to cross the threshold into Parliament without help.
The Social Democratic Party which began to develop its own profile during the first five years after the collapse of communism, split, and there other parties branched off from it, the Liberal Union Party, the Social Democracy Party and the Social Democrat Party, the Mother Party. Thanks to the support of the SP and DP, the two parties that broke away from the Social Democratic Party have leaders who are also MPs. The only party that attempted to crack the bipolarity systemof Albanian politics on its own, is the faction created by former socialist PM Ilir Meta which he called the Socialist Movement for Integration (SMI),, but its seats in Parliament declined in number due to the Dushke scheme, the manipulation and theft of votes by taking advantage of the electoral system. The parties are now striving to find a system that will minimize the possibilities of stealing votes and this is why the SMI has gone in the direction of a break away from the SP coalition and the creation of a new left wing coalition. It is still too early to foresee the consequences in the upcoming elections of 2009. The key to making possible predictions should in fact be sought in the electoral system. Meanwhile, the electoral reform and the electoral system depend on the today’s Parliament. This means that the new Parliament to be produced by the 2009 elections actually depends on the old parliament, the one we have today. Although it is high time for a clean break with electoral issues in Albania, at the end of the day, this all depends on the past. So we have a number of ghost parties which thanks to a series of manipulative acts and distorted interpretations of the Electoral Code, today have within their grasp the power to decide on the future of politics in Albania.
The question of the journalist on how much a new MP costs in Albania remains unanswered. Unfortunately, it appears that publicly there will be no reply. The answer will continue to be whispered in the recesses of the capital’s coffee shops.