On April 28, US Ambassador Donald Lu, EU Ambassador Romana Vlahutin, and OSCE Head of Mission Bernd Borchardt invited the smaller parties from both the majority and the opposition for a meeting. Although the details of this meeting were not released to the public, several politicians attending the meeting claimed that the ambassadors had tried to convince the smaller parties, including those currently boycotting the elections, to profit from the absence of the Democratic Party to gain more votes during the elections and thus establish a “new opposition.”
The question is whether such a scenario is feasible at all.
Now that all parties have handed in their candidate lists, we know that a total of 17 parties will take part in the elections of June 18. Although polling in Albania is unreliable at best, a few, very tentative predictions may be made based on the current voting system that is in place, the new distribution of the number of mandates, and extrapolating the election outcome of the parliamentary elections of 2013.
The current election system has divided Albania in 12 electoral zones with a fixed number of mandates based on the population count. In order to be eligible for a mandate, a political party needs to gather more than 3% of the votes in a certain zone. As there are no electoral coalitions this time, it is expected that smaller parties will have considerably more trouble meeting this threshold than in 2013, when they could profit from their strong allies.
So far, it does not appear that either Ben Blushi or Gjergj Bojaxhiu has been able to attract many voters from the opposition, and even if they would these numbers would have to be very substantial to make a difference. Assuming the same voting numbers as in 2013, with the opposition voters by and large boycotting the elections, and both Blushi and Bojaxhiu securing a seat in the Tirana electoral zone, we arrive at the following distribution of the 140 parliamentary seats.
These election results approach those of the victory of the Democratic Party in 1996 (87% of the seats in Parliament) and the Socialist Party in 1997 (65%). Elections which both were held in times of considerable social upheaval.
This very rough estimate also means that even a doubling in size of the LSI or an unexpectedly strong showing of the “new opposition” will not be able to prevent the PS from securing a majority in Parliament. In fact, it is very likely that the PS will even lock down the qualified majority of 84 votes to change the Constitution on its own.
In other words, the hopes of Lu, Vlahutin, and Borchardt that a “new opposition” would have a chance of taking over the baton from the PD seem to be very far from any possible reality. In fact, the most likely outcome of the elections will be a de facto autocracy.
