TIRANA, Oct. 15 – The Albanian Constitutional Court has no jurisdiction to review the validity of Albania’s last local elections, according to an opinion issued by experts of the Venice Commission.
The country’s highest court had sought the commission’s expert opinion on a case that could lead to the invalidation of the last local elections, which were boycotted by the opposition and resulted in the ruling Socialist Party winning all but one of the country’s 61 municipal mayoral seats. The elections also saw the lowest voter turnout ever in Albania.
After recommending that the president had no power to postpone elections, It is the second such opinion on the matter issued by the Venice Commission, a Council of Europe body to which Albanian authorities often reach out for independent expert opinions.
Both opinions essentially close any legal avenue for voiding the last local elections and holding new ones ahead of time.
While the Venice Commission’s opinions are not binding and the Constitutional Court could still rule on its own to contravene them, typically Albanian institutions that seek VC’s legal opinions abide by them.
The Association of Municipalities, still led by the opposition at the time, took the case to court. After an initial hearing with all sides presenting the case in June, earlier this year, the court sought the opinion of the Venice Commission.
One of the questions related to whether the Constitutional Court had jurisdiction in the case. And the VC experts concluded that “the competence of the Constitutional Court does not include reviewing the validity of local elections,” adding that this “does not prevent the Constitutional Court from exercising its control over the electoral legislation.”
There were two more issues the court wanted clarified, but the first answer negates them in terms of the court’s ability to intervene.
The second question related to the relationship between the principle of periodicity of elections and holding them on the principle of pluralism in elections. In more than half the municipal races, only one candidate was available on the ballot, due to the opposition’s boycott.
On this issue, the Venice Commission itself had presented a relatively broad argument in its 2019 opinion, when it reviewed the decision of President Ilir Meta to cancel the election date. At the time, the commission had stated that “electoral boycotts by political parties, even if they represent a significant part of the electorate, cannot prevent regular elections. Otherwise, these parties would use the lever to completely prevent any election.”
In the current draft opinion, experts specify that “the principles of election periodicity and political pluralism are unlikely to conflict with each other as they are expressed in very different types of rules. Pluralism may be a legitimate aim to intervene in periodicity, but for that aim to prevail, the interference must have a legal basis and be proportionate. Parliament has a wide discretion to decide on providing a legal basis for postponing elections; in the absence of such a basis, the Constitutional Court may consider the postponement as unconstitutional.”
And in the opinion of 2019, while analyzing the actions of President Iir Meta, the Commission had stated that the “president can cancel the elections for local government bodies only in a situation which meets the criteria for taking emergency measures. Even then, the President needs a specific — ad hoc — legal basis to postpone the elections.” Based on that reasoning, the Commission assessed that President Meta had exceeded his powers.
President Meta had issued a decree to postpone the elections, cancelling his earlier decree, in order to ensure wider participation, but the ruling Socialists and election officials said the date of the elections couldn’t be touched and moved forward with the elections.
The third question was on whether the holding of the elections “violated the right of voters to have meaningful choices,” particularly since the Constitutional Court was not functioning at the time and could not hold an emergency hearing.
According to VC experts, “Question nr. 3 raises the issue of legal uncertainty in the context of the 2019 local elections. Even if such legal uncertainty cannot be challenged, political uncertainty has profoundly and repeatedly affected the Albanian political scene to an even greater extent. While “public authorities and political parties” have not secured the “highest interest of the voters,” the reason does not come simply from their “actions”, but from the constant controversies between them, which go to the point of eroding the very legitimacy of democracy before the electorate.”
For this reason, according to the experts, “it remains the co-responsibility of public authorities and the entire political spectrum to restore trust in Albanian institutions and in the electoral process. This implies the responsibility of all these stakeholders to promote political dialogue between all political forces, as well as between national institutions, such as the Central Election Commission, among others. It also means restoring a meaningful choice for voters.”
The full text of the opinion has yet to be made public, but key findings were made available to the Voice of America’s Albanian section, which broke the story.
