Socialists ready to protest, says Rama

TIRANA, March 2 – Main opposition Socialist Party leader Edi Rama on Tuesday threatened that Albanians would soon start protests for their voting rights.
Rama exploited the idea of a protest against the price hike of the electricity supply and the alleged abuse of pricing from the power distribution corporation last month.
“Any Albanian who is ready not to agree with the bad-governing should be ready for protest,” he said at a news conference.
That was likely the daily warning that the opposition is making for the transparency of the June 28 election.
The opposition, which has 64 seats (joined by one more seat of an ally) in the 140-seat parliament, ended their boycott last week but conditioned their further presence with two draft laws they handed over, one on the investigation of the poll and the other for the transparency of the cast ballots.
On Tuesday the Socialist party also nominated their senior leader Gramoz Ruci as head of their parliamentary grouping.
The same day Ruci took part in a meeting in parliament with his other political counterparts to decide that the two laws will be discussed in the parliament March 18.
The two main parties, including governing Democratic Party of Prime Minister Sali Berisha which controls 75 seats in the parliament, are involved in an ongoing fight whether to reopen a number of ballot boxes from last year’s poll.
The Socialists want to reopen a number of ballot boxes though they have accepted the election results. They say that transparency will stop the abuse of the vote that has continued since the fall of communism in 1990.
But the governing Democrats say that would break the law as it was the Electoral College that has given its verdict for many claims of the opposition.
Meanwhile a prosecutor in Fier district has asked the district court to open a criminal case against five Democrat commissioners charging them with abuse of post when casting fake ballots in the boxes.
If found guilty, commissioners may be sentenced up to seven years imprisonment for such a crime.