Venice Commission offers advice, urges political will on polls

TIRANA, Dec. 18 – The Venice Commission and the OSCE prepared a report and offered advice on how to arrange a normal and indisputable holding of the elections in Albania.
But what one can immediately notice in their words is that the Albanian political groupings should, first of all, trust each other and apply their real and concrete political will on holding polls according to international democratic standards.
“The recurring problems with the conduct of democratic elections in Albania cannot be resolved merely through changes in electoral legislation,” the report said. The Venice Commission experts said that nothing can be achieved in that process “without a change of attitudes and practices by the main political groupings and their leaders.”
And that is something that neither the expertise of this commission, nor the international pressure can achieve without the desire of the Albanian political parties to do that.
Post-communist Albania has never held an indisputable election in the last two decades and no elections has fully met international standards due to allegations of fraud and disputed results usually from the opposition.
The opposition Socialists claimed manipulation of counting at the 2009 general elections and since then the country has been in a political crisis, which has brought EU-mandated reforms to a standstill.
The May 8 local elections changed nothing for better. The key race for Tirana, in which opposition leader Edi Rama faced former interior minister Lulzim Basha, ended in three months of legal wrangling after Basha won by a razor-thin majority.
All these developments have shown that Albanian political parties are practically not capable of holding regular polls.
For the moment both main political parties have agreed to work on electoral reform and they have already started talks on that.
The joint report of the Venice Commission and the OSCE’s office for Human Rights and Democratic Institutions (ODIHR) recommends the insertion of new rules into the electoral code to ensure the appointment of members of election commissions in a timely manner and prevent their removal except when duly motivated. It calls for changes to, and clarification of, vote-counting procedures, especially concerning miscast ballots, which were one of the sticking points in the race in Tirana. The report also urges taking better account of the specificities of local elections in the electoral code, in particular as regards provisions on media access and campaign financing.
It would likely not be difficult to apply such recommendations, unless the Albanian political parties remained in their old stand and behavior during the election process.
“This change is indispensable if one wishes to reduce conflicts and polarization within the election administration,” the report says, adding that “under present circumstances, it will be extremely difficult in Albania to identify a person or body who could appoint such non-partisan members of the election administration in a way that is deemed impartial.”
The talks on the electoral reform are a good start. The two main political parties should also pay attention to the demands from the smaller political groupings, which want a bigger say in the process. There are already hints of changing the electoral process to a partial regional proportional one to a national proportional one.