Parliament resumes work prolonging electoral reform committee’s functioning

TIRANA, Sept. 4 – The Albanian parliament on Monday resumed its plenary sessions after the summer vacations with a consensual decision giving a committee more time to draft electoral reforms agreed by the Balkan country’s two main parties to resolve a dispute that had threatened to delay municipal elections. This committee was set up May 18 to draft electoral reform legislation, but after only four meetings it has held it has made no progress until the end of its mid-August mandate because of disagreements between Prime Minister Sali Berisha’s governing Democratic Party and the opposition Socialist Party.
“This new session will work to formalize the achieved agreement between the majority and the opposition, fruit of the institutional parliamentary cooperation,” said Parliament Speaker Jozefina Topalli at the start of the session. “The deal and electoral reforms are only a speedy start. Other big reforms are our joint challenge,” she added.
Pandeli Majko f the Socialists and Bamir Topi of the Democrats spoke in the same lines promising cooperation in the electoral reform. Though they did not forget to remind each other of their weak points, according to them. Berisha also offered his government’s readiness to cooperate for ‘free and fair elections.”
In a sign of reconciliation Topi supported Socialists’ request to extend the committee’s mandate until mid-October instead of end of September as Topalli was insisting at the beginning.
The election reform committee now has until mid-October to draft and present the new legislation based on the agreement to parliament in time for the country of 3.2 million to hold municipal elections between Nov. 20 and Jan. 20.
Last week, Berisha’s party and the Socialists agreed to increase the number of central election committee members, extend local officials’ terms from three to four years and rule out use of a disputed voters list. They also agreed to add two new members to the National Council of Radio and Television to give more voice to the opposition.
Lawmakers for the opposition, led by Tirana Mayor Edi Rama, had threatened to boycott the municipal elections and call for street protests unless the government agreed to the electoral changes. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the United States welcomed the Albanian compromise, and urged that it be implemented quickly.