Opposition threatens none can touch the vote

TIRANA, June 22 – The opposition has been insisting and continuously repeating every day that no one, that is, the governing coalition, can touch the Albanians’ vote, or in other words can manipulate them.
That has been the statement coming from the Socialist Party leader Edi Rama in many cities and towns he’s visited during the last few days.
For that purpose a meeting that the Socialist Movement for Integration tried to convene on Monday was to be held, though no other coalition parties participated.
In the 2007 local elections opposition Socialists organized groups of former policemen and other people in order to prevent the manipulation of votes at the ballot box. Very often that resulted in a show of physical strength between different supporters.
Regardless, they claim that was a main tool of their success in the capital Tirana.
According to Edi Rama there will be no possibility to steal the vote or play any games votes belonging to the socialists.
“For what can we speak today in 2009 if we are not free once and for all from this old politics of the past, which is the politics of politicians, who are proud of democratic standards and then threaten the teachers, threaten the physicians, threaten the civil servants by reducing the state to submission for the interests of a handful of people, for the interests of a court of corrupted persons, for the interests of a family which has taken the government of our country hostage, for the interests of a Prime Minister who wants by all manner and means the mandate to continue doing business with the government for the benefit of his family. We will win because the past can not be transformed into the future and the future can not be hostage in the hands of the old politics of the past.”
The opposition also called on the government and other public institutions not to threaten their personnel with being fired from their job unless they vote “properly”.
Rama asked citizens to inform the Socialist Party cases of pressure exercised and the officials who commit these acts: “We will sue all the directors of the state who do not perform the job they are paid for and protect the interests of power, whether being in police uniform, being in uniform of high-ranking officials of the state administration, for whom we will have testimonies that they have threatened the citizens, the subordinates, the teachers and the physicians, and there will be no power to protect them from the punishment of law.”
At the same time they assured all public personnel they would be classified based on their political affiliation.