The political theme of the day is: How possible is it for the Socialist Party (PS) to organize elections without the participation of the Democratic Party (PD)? Is this democratic or even fair? It has been many months since PD has declared that it would not participate in elections until their demands are honored. They are adamant that free and fair elections are possible only through a caretaker government.
Albanian politics has become a scene of mischief rather than of concern for the consequences of losing a significant part of the representation of population in Parliament; it is has started to make opportunistic calculations that stand on the verge of the unreasonable.
Many public figures of PS have loudly proclaimed that they might have a go at elections alone and certainly win. The Prime Minister himself is the biggest champion of the thesis that was discussed in the National Assembly of PS and followed by its closest people, even when LSI had declared that it wouldn’t be part of elections without the opposition.
Despite Meta’s standpoint, Rama has declared that opposition could be substituted by other parties that can get votes and serve the same function in Parliament.
This is a functional mathematical approach to the concept of political representation and parliamentary democracy that the Albanian prime minister is embodying: the opposition is by definition always against and always loses in Parliament because it is the minority. So the opposition is not needed but for anything but for debates the outcome of which is known.
This is a coherent concept and an “Erdoğanist” approach applied by Rama so far, but which seems intolerable from the standpoint of European democracy.
The two new parties Libra of Ben Blushi and Sfida of Gjergj Bojaxhiu, offered as anti-system parties to the public, aim to fundamentally change a lack of real democracy in the Albanian scene. Both seem to support the view of Rama that elections should be held on June 18. This would give them a position of tactical advantage and they would get votes that they otherwise wouldn’t.
What seems impossible to accept is the political rationality of those parties that have officially justified their establishment with the lack of an inner democracy of traditional parties and have constantly accused these traditional parties for the problems of accurate representation. In traditional parties candidates are handpicked by their leaders.
Albanian politics is once again proposing false solutions or leaders that are reflected as alternatives but that display a greed for power instead, showing in their first presentations no political reasoning, but only electoral calculations.
In the current times, when there is a general lack of trust in the political class, a new party that deems itself an alternative should show in order to be credible respect for its declared values and stay far away from archaic short-term, unethical calculations.
To enter elections as the only opposition, with four parliamentary groups staying out of them, under these circumstances, the only benefits are from a mathematical point of view, but such a move does not represent the democratic values that Blushi and Bojaxhi are seeking.
For these reasons neither Blushi nor Bojaxhi should be part of the elections without the participation of traditional parties. Going solo would make them ridiculous.
