Four civil society organizations, five months ago, in October 2019 they addressed the parties with a letter political, with proposals for changes in the electoral code. Representatives of civil society consider that the electoral reform should also affect the law on parties, the financing of campaigns, as well as the role of political forces in the management of elections. Organizations seek to be active contributors to this product, the preparation of which should be left to them. experts.
Author Arlis ALICAJ
"The debate process on the reform of the electoral system and supplementary legislation (law on political parties, electoral financing and electoral administration) should be carried out mainly on the basis of expertise (through independent Albanian and international experts and political party experts). Political decision-making should be a continuation of the product of expertise and not the opposite". is underlined in the CSO letter.
The mixed proportional system applied in the Republic of Albania during the 90s: "The mixed system applied in 1992 in Albania, with 100 areas in the majority and compensatory formula with 40 mandates in national proportional with electoral threshold of 2.5 percent". the letter continues.
CSOs are aware that no system in itself is a guarantee for elections with high standards. They appeal for a new modern law on political parties, a new law on electoral financing, as well as the removal of the parties' monopoly on the electoral administration process.
Afrim Krasniqi, the head of one of the leading organizations in the paper, the Institute for Political Studies, told the Center for Quality Journalism/BIRN that the political parties law of 2010 is completely non-functional and out of reality.
"A new law would enable parties to be more democratic from the inside (as required by Article 9 of the Constitution), more functional with decision-making structures, more separated from the state and not so overpowering as they are today" .
The administration of elections in Albania has always been done through political parties. Since the electoral reform of 2003, the political parity of position/opposition has prevailed throughout the electoral pyramid (Central Election Commission, Zonal Administration Commissions and Voting Center Commissions), civil society thinks that the time has come to give up the monopoly of the two parties.
Proportional system proposed by CSOs: "Proportional system with open lists of many names of parties (where voters' choices determine the order in the list), with a (national) electoral district, with an electoral threshold of 2.5 percent for parties and 4% for coalitions". the letter continues.
"We think, - says Krasniqi, that the time has come for the responsibility to pass to different social groups, such as law students, bank employees or teachers and local civil society communities. A strong foundation against the use of state resources in electoral campaigns and the criminal records of candidates would bring about the clear separation of campaign agendas from state agendas, minimizing expenses, increasing the quality of parliament, and forcing parties to create competitive elites." .
Panajot Sako of the Thurje initiative says that more than depoliticization of the electoral structure, it is about (de)militarization.
"Today, election commissions are treated as battlefields and parties consider the members they send there as soldiers going to war. And this has effectively turned the election administration into a cell, into a battle, where the citizen's vote is the spoils that the winner or loser of the battle receives. KVCs that turn into arenas of boxing, fighting and looting. Counting groups that, with an SMS from the party leader, block the process for weeks and the citizens remain at the whim of one or the other party leader to find out the fate of their elections. This madness must stop!” Sako added.
Will civil society proposals be considered?
"In the first stages of the debate, it seems as if there is a care and attention to the proposals of interest groups. The first impression is that the proposals are being heard and noted. But as soon as the first phase passes... and when the concrete writing of the changes begins, we have had no more invitations", - says Afrim Krasniqi from ISP.
"The same situation is now. After the creation of the Political Council between the majority and the opposition, we no longer had invitations or opportunities to communicate with the group dealing with the electoral reform". We have addressed some new additional suggestions, but in general in 90% of cases, as in the past and now, we have not had a response from the Commissions for the reform.
Decision makers are not completely indifferent. In the multitude of proposals they select what they like. "We feel good, - says Krasniqi, that our insistence of the last 3-4 years for a new law on political parties has already been accepted by the parties and they have publicly declared the need for a new law". The same situation applies to completing the legislation on referendums or strengthening the components of electoral financial transparency. "However, as in the past and now, whenever the parties accept an idea of civil society, they do so very late and take care to present it as their own idea, so they do not allow other actors, such as civil society, to to be empowered as a voice and to be accepted as a party in such reforms" said Krasniqi from ISP.
Civil society in unison with the recommendations of the OSCE - ODHIR.
The conclusion of the elections in Albania is accompanied by the recommendations of the OSCE - ODHIR. The recommendations are not few and the list is being added. There are currently 34 recommendations that are expected to be addressed. Civil Society Organizations are almost in unison with these recommendations.
"Our demands do not have any fundamental difference from those of ODIHR, on the contrary, we converge on a common denominator in the implementation of electoral processes with standards and as little as possible contested and accepted by the political class in the country" Gerta Meta from the Association for Democratic Culture (SHKD) told BIRN/ACQJ.
SHKD, in all its public statements, underlines the fact that the Electoral Reform has failed with the will of the parties and continues to remain hostage to the deliberate lack of political will, especially of the two major parties SP and DP.
The changes are hostage to the lack of political will to agree on an electoral system that will guarantee free and fair elections where the vote of the sovereign is read and calculated according to the choice that the sovereign actually makes and not deformed by political militants, says Meta. For the head of SHKD, it is important to respect all the penalties defined for all those people who violate the electoral law.
Vote for immigrants, broken promise
But the most attention and time for debates on electoral reform is related to two issues that are not on the long list of OSCE-ODHIR recommendations, one is the immigrant vote and the other is the use of technology in elections.
Afrim Krasniqi from ISP emphasizes that the issue of the vote of immigrants must receive a serious solution. He recalls that the Albanian government signed the agreement with IOM in 2004 and promised to implement their vote in 2009.
"10 years have passed and nothing has happened. Parties use the vote of immigrants for electoral purposes and then forget about it, as they are no longer interested in them. You cannot prioritize immigrants and on the other hand, with wrong policies, increase the number of new immigrants leaving the country every year."
Albania does not yet have a registry of immigrants nor a mechanism for their representation. "From 2009 and especially in 2011, 2015 and 2017, political parties brought immigrants by plane and bus from abroad to secure votes and after the elections they really abandoned their votes,"Krasinqi said.
Gerta Meta from SHKD underlines that "the inclusion of the vote of immigrants and their representation in parliament would increase citizens' confidence in their vote, as well as minimize the abuse and manipulation of the vote of immigrants by not allowing the use of their vote by other persons, artificially increasing the number of voters on election day".
Is the electoral system under pressure from 51,724 firms?
"Changing the electoral system is one of the main objectives of the #Thurje initiative. The one-year action of the initiative was finalized with the signatures of over 51,724 citizens of voting age and a draft law submitted to the Electoral Reform Commission. The draft law calls for a national proportional electoral system with open lists, electronic vote counting, voting for immigrants and the expansion of the powers of CEC to administer the elections. We judge that the country is in vital need of a high-dose injection of participatory democracy,”says Panajot Sako of the Knit initiative.
"...The citizen should have more than just a regular appeal once every four years!".
Sako thinks that the pressure of over 50 voter signatures will be enough to convince the big parties that they have a proposal that cannot be ignored.
The proposals of civil society organizations for the electoral reform are on the table of the Political Council, an ad hoc mechanism that now balances the representation of the parliamentary and non-parliamentary opposition. Changing the system, depoliticizing the electoral structure, financing parties and election campaigns, voting for immigrants are the main proposals of civil society. The political parties will decide on these proposals. Will they give up their monopoly on election administration and be more transparent about campaign financing? The answers to these questions will be tested in the following weeks, which is also the deadline set to have a consensual electoral reform.
