Polls: A New Pole Of The Right

TIRANA, May 5 – Albania’s former Democratic Party Prime Minister Aleksander Meksi said Tuesday he would run for a parliamentary seat this time with the Movement for National Development, LZHK, for the June 28th parliamentary elections.
Meksi is one of the founders of the Democratic Party in December 1990 and then became its first premier in 1992 until 1997.
It seemed that after that he was not in good terms with the party leader, now Prime Minister and leader of the Democratic Party Sali Berisha. During these years Meksi has kept a low profile not mixed in the daily political squabbling. Meksi said he was joining LZHK to reform the party under EU standards.
“Only through work will we make possible an Albania that is part of Europe,” Meksi said at a press conference.
Remembering his political start in life Meksi said he aimed to bring back the values of the student movement that brought down communism in 1991.
“Our goal is to install justice and not function according to nepotism or business interests as a party,” he said.
Meksi left politics more than 12-years-ago, after his Democratic Party government was forced to resign in midst of Albania’s pyramid scheme crises, when the country’s population lost its life-savings and then started a series of violent protest against the central government. For days the country was in almost complete anarchy after protesters stormed army barracks and the government failed.
The LZHK is expected to run in coalition with the Christian Democrats in the Freedom Pole coalition, aiming to swing votes away from the right wing voters of Berisha’s Democratic Party.
The new coalition has already found support from the associations of former political prisoners and land owners expropriated by the communist regime.
Meksi said they would work to give an end to the economic problems and poverty, compensate former political prisoners and expropriated owners and “above all employ Albanians.”