By Blendi Kajsiu
Nothing new from the West. This is perhaps an acurate summing up of the preliminary assessment which the International Community made of the electoral process. As per usual, the internationals said that Albania has made tangible progress, but still has a long way to go to reach standards. More or less, this was the essence of the preliminary findings statement of ODIHR. Naturally this report and the assessments made by the Internationals will be the subjects of many debates amongst the local players. There will be sides (in these debates), which, quite correctly will claim that the Internationals could not have been more negative in their assessments about the electoral process, particularly when it is believed broadly that, at least the first phase of the electoral process (voting) was the best ever held in these twenty years of transition. Another side, also just as as correctly, will claim that now Albania is a NATO member so the standards against which it is graded are higher. In a NATO member country, pressure exerted by the government on the state administration, using school pupils or civil servants in public electoral rallies to fill squares and halls; using public funds to finance the election campaigns are unacceptable phenomena. Even the current government finds it difficult to deny the existence of such phenomena, which otherwise, has every right to boast about the organisation of a very good electoral process. However, it is difficult to believe that such very ugly phenomena have managed to change the essence of the will of the electorate in favour of the government, quite on the contrary. This is precisely where the fundamental issue lies regarding these standards the intenationals use to mark the recent Albanian general elections. The Internationals are still highly critical of the form, whilst the fundamental problem of elections in Albania now has to do with the content. The fundamental criticism has to do with the implementation of the Law, whilst the fundamental problem of our electoral zone is the Law itself, the implementation of which is the source and not the solution of the problem. Far more problematic than the nomination of commission members on time is the system and the Electoral Code themselves, which do not produce either representation or government, but which was created to exclusively consolidate the bipartisanship of the DP and SP, eliminating every other potential force. Far more worrying than the lack of ink or the insufficient training of commission members, were the amendments to the Constitution which were carried out in the most non-democratic and non transparent manner possible at the service of the interests of the two main leaders Rama and Berisha. Suprisingly enough though, this profoundly anti-democratic legislation, which today produces a distorted political scene is regarded as a positive achievement by international observers; for the mere reason that it was achieved with consensus and without any fuss by both sides, who approved it with quite a frightening majority of votes. It is astounding how easily the internationals identify the large number of parties which participated in the elections with the real possibilities to be elected. According to them, the electorate were offered a broad range of viewpoints thanks to the overwhelming number of media outlets, electronic and written, which gave so much space to the political parties to broadcast their messages.
If there is something for which these elections will be remembered by, it is the very narrow range of approaches and views offered to the electorate and which were whittled down to the two opposing but symetrical stands of the SP and DP. It is difficult to find, over these past 20 years, an electoral campaign in which the electorate has had so few possibilities to chose from, not only because both the SP and DP offered two identical models of governing, but also the constitutional amd electoral changes strangled from the very outset all political alternatives. Therefore it is no suprise that these elections do not have a clear cut winner. The very political offer they produced divided the electorate symetrically. In the face of these problems of content, the formal concerns manifsted by the internationals seem as periphical as they are surreral in Alb anian conditions. All the hype over the issue of the ID cards is absurd when the Internationals themselves say that all that was needed to get this issue of the ID cards solved was the political will of the two main parties, in other words this was a political problem. The polarization between the DP and SP may have produced tension, but how can there ever be an electoral campaign without polarization and political tension? The curt and agressive language during the campaign may have rasped on the ears of certain Internationals, but this was the most positive campaign conducted in the past 20 years. It is also true that the bipartisan commissions often bloc the process or steal the votes of the smaller parties, however, in comparison with “the independent commissions,” who counted votes for power, they are more a solution than a problem. And they will be so for as long as the political parties function as narrow clientele groups in a political-economic system where the pie is divided into more and more slices and less and less is produced. Therefore in the conditions of today, the main problem in the elctoral process in Albania is not meeting formal criteria for free and fair elections. Irrespective of the criticism of the International Community, overall these election were the most free and fair we have every seen. The problem is that in an electoral process where both the Majority and the Opposition enjoyed free reign over the entire media and physical space of communicating with the electorate, they ran out of things to say and could only repeat themselves to the most annoying degree. The issue is that the more our elections reach official standards, the less alternatives they offer. But this is not an issue that could be understood or dealt with, with the standards of the internationals who merely look at the formal side of the process. We need other standards.
