Back To Square One?

Upon arrival in Albania, Ambassador Audrey Glover, the Head of the international monitoring mission for the June 28th general elections might have been reminded of the intensive and tense negotiations between ODIHR and the Government of Albania on the 1996 local elections. After ODIHR’s critical report on the controversial 1996 parliamentary elections, the Albanian government contested the monitoring of the local elections by this organization. Only four months after ODIHR had barely given a passing grade to the May 26th parliamentary elections, Audrey Glover, Head of ODIHR at the time, was involved in intense talks aiming to convince the government of then President Berisha to allow the monitoring of the administrative elections.
The thirteen years that have gone by since that time should have sufficed to make the ‘ODIHR conflict’ a matter of the past, a closed chapter. And understandably, the only thing that cannot have occurred to Ambassador Glover is the current contestation of the government of former president Berisha of her appointment as head of the mission that will observe and monitor the parliamentary elections to be held at the end of June. However, the unpredictable and unbelievable has indeed happened – the government hesitates to accept the former head of ODIHR as chief of the monitoring mission for the general elections. Even though there has been no public, official stance on the matter, it is clear that the government is against the appointment of Ambassador Glover as head of the international monitoring mission. In Tirana for over a week now, the Head of the ODIHR mission has been refused meetings with Albanian authorities, including the Head of Central Election Commission.
The absence of a public, official contestation of the appointment of Glover at the lead of the mission that will assess the upcoming electoral process seems to preserve the government the option of ‘nevertheless accepting’ Ambassador Glover as head of the international observers. It is hard to believe that the government might be realistically hoping for the replacement of Ambassador Glover. The government already knew it, before ODIHR and the European Union pointed out that ‘the parties to the game do not choose the referee’. But if the Albanian government is fully aware that it does not get to select election observers, the very humble question is: Why is it then contesting the appointment of Ambassador Glover who will accredit the standards of the upcoming electoral process? A very plausible answer is that the government does not actually aim at having the Head of the International Monitoring Mission replaced, not only because it cannot, but also because it has no use for it. What Prime Minister Berisha’s government is doing is simply contesting. Ambassador Glover is contested, clear and simple, as the leading person of the mission of observers so as to pave the way for the mission and the results of its team to be potentially contested too.
Less than a month and a half from Election Day, the prevailing trend of the domestic political fight and electoral campaigns is contestation and a conflictual spirit. The opposition’s list of contestations is long, starting with the government’s will to equip citizens with identity cards as the only way for them to vote. Alongside local disputes, we are now presented with a contested ODIHR head of monitoring mission in Tirana. If this spirit of contests and conflicts continues, the June 28th parliamentary elections that are meant to be a turning point in Albania’s controversial election record may end up slowing down, or halting reforms altogether, in a country that has just become a NATO member and has just filed its EU membership application.