TIRANA, June 2 – A redeveloped university campus and a massive new multi-sport complex. Lower taxes and subsidies for an array of goods and services. These are a few of the electoral pledges various mayoral candidates and party leaders are making on the campaign trail.
The promises follow an increasingly negative campaign that has seen Prime Minister Edi Rama of the governing Socialist Party and opposition Democratic Party leader Lulzim Basha blame each-other for bad governance at the local and national levels.
Both Rama and Basha are traveling around the country, giving the campaign for local elections a national character.
Rama has spearheaded many electoral meetings flanked by his party’s candidates across the country, handing out deeds for newly-legalized homes built without permits in the chaotic post-communism years.
In a busy agenda that makes it difficult to sort out where his duties as prime minister end and where his campaign role starts, Rama has promised six million euros to build an Olympic Center in Tirana that will serve not only as offices for several sport federations but also as a gathering place for sport lovers to train and play.
Rama also attended an event that promised a new campus in Tirana’s Students’ Town. He announced the start of an international competition of eight studios for the university campus.
Both projects have also featured among the plans of Socialist candidate for Tirana mayor, Erion Veliaj.
Basha’s national campaign has focused primarily on portraying Albania in a dire economic situation with high unemployment, low wages and high prices.
He blames Rama’s government for the situation and urges voters to support local Democratic Party candidates, who he said will cut local taxes and promote job growth.
At the local level, candidates are also making their own promises. The Democrats’ candidate in southwestern Vlora said his administration would pay 3,500 leks per month to poor families to subsidize them for the higher energy prices they have been forced to pay by the central government.
The Democratic Party mayoral candidate, Halim Kosova, said this week he has a plan to offer Tirana 24-hours of running water, removing the need to use water tanks most residents rely on.
Incumbents from both parties have also lined up tens of public projects they want to inaugurate right before the polls.
Most candidates are holding well-rehearsed public events and buying advertisements, and critics say hundreds of thousands of euros are being spent as part of the campaign with little explanation where the money is coming from or what the donors expect in return.
Gjergj Bojaxhi, an independent candidate for mayor of Tirana, has particularly focused on this point, adding he is trying to crowd-source his campaign with all donors’ name being made public to make sure he is not held hostage to interest groups acting against the public interest.
