Solana avoids comments on Albania polls. Diplomacy?!

TIRANA, July 15 – EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana made a regional tour to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo but not Albania.
The understanding was quite clear – Europe expects Albania to first conclude election results, create a new parliament and government and then start to talk with Brussels.
Solana also avoided giving any reaction to the Albanian polls while in Kosovo Wednesday.
Was that normal diplomacy? Yes, that’s normal. Europe should first let Albanians decide for themselves and see how mature is that democracy.
The June 28 parliamentary polls were considered a test of its democracy, how capable the tiny Balkan country is able to comply with international standards.
The OSCE/ODIHR monitoring mission has said that Albania has made a lot of progress.
Some 500 international election observers have been monitoring Albania’s election process, considered an important test for the tiny Balkan country’s progress towards democracy.
In their first reaction after the June 28 election, the observers reported some improvement but cited a need for further progress to comply with international standards including an end to widespread family voting and the polarized political climate.
Last week they said that political interference had delayed the vote count of last month’s general election in Albania.
The observers assessed the count as bad or very bad at 22 out of 66 voting centers, which “provoked tensions among parties, especially where results were or appeared to be close.”
They also noted procedural problems due to lack of sufficient training and guidance, and criticized the Central Elections Commission, the leading administrative body, of insufficient guidance of lower level administration and inconsistent handling of complaints.
Berisha, whose party won, said that these were the best elections Albania has ever had. On the other side, Socialist Party Chairman Edi Rama criticized the election process, saying that the standards required of a country that is now part of NATO were not achieved. Rama said the process had a lot of problems, especially during the counting of votes.
These elections showed that Albanians remain evenly divided in their political preferences, even though the two major parties had little differences in their programs. European integration and visa liberalization with E.U. were two major issues during the electoral campaign.
The leaders of two major parties dominated the election, leaders who spent more time during the campaign singing songs about the need to change Albania than talking about real issues that can bring change to the country.
Membership of the EU will be the principal target of the re-elected government in Albania.
The election dispute comes as Albania is seeking to improve its election standards and to gain eventual EU membership. Albania, which joined NATO in April, has been under intense international pressure to ensure the seventh post-communist vote was free of the kind of fraud that marred the first six elections held after the Balkan country’s communist regime fell in 1990.
Berisha’s government submitted a formal application for joining the EU in April this year. Even though European Commission (EC) officials considered the application premature, the initiation of the EU integration process did win Berisha sympathy among Albanian voters.
On Wednesday Brussels did not include Albania with three other Balkan countries to have a visa-free regime next year.
One could not say that meant it did not pass the democracy exam. No, because visas were based on a road map for each individual country. But still it meant something.
The road to the EU does not seem easy for Albania. One of the main requests placed by the EC on candidate states is to tackle high-level corruption which might affect the distribution of EU funds.
EU officials are likely to be tough on Albania, after being forced last year to withdraw hundreds of millions of Euros in aid from Bulgaria because of mismanagement of such moneys.
Corruption is not the only problem the new Albanian government has to face. The world financial crisis has already started taking its toll on the poor country, with Tirana dailies reporting last week that migrant remittances, an important source of income for Albania, have practically dried up in the first half of 2009. A third of Albanians are estimated to be living abroad.
The government does not accept that. In his Wednesday cabinet meeting Berisha hailed again public figures of a 6 percent growth during the first quarter this year compared to last year.
For the moment Albania should first end the vote re-count and create the new parliament. Then the new government, whatever it is, will face a very difficult task ahead, but one that it cannot sideline. European integration is the main target for the country’s near future.