As Parliament will go on recess within a week, Prime Minister Edi Rama can look back at a successful “reconstruction” of a Parliament with 122 seats and 18 permanent vacancies. Apart from the question whether such a Parliament is Constitutional (the Constitution states Parliament has 140 members), the current ranks of the parliamentary opposition are filled with a hotch-potch of bottom-of-the-barrel MPs, happy to pick up a seat (and salary and immunity) in Parliament that they would otherwise never would have won through democratic elections.
While the actual opposition has vacated Parliament, the new, post-boycott MPs have formed three new political groups: The Independents, the Democrats, and the Rightwing Party. While the Democrats consist only of former Democratic Party members, and the Independents comprise former Socialist Movement for Integration members, the Rightwing Party contains members of both PD and LSI. Meanwhile, there are still two “real” LSI MPs in Parliament, while a large group of non-affiliated MPs contain former members of the PD and the LSI, one MP thrown out by the PS, the MPs of the PDIU, and PS ally Tom Doshi of the PSD.
The three new political groups seem to be more or less ad-hoc structures, mainly established to profit from the parliamentary office space and services that come with belonging to a political group. Otherwise, in terms of voting behavior, these groups have no consistent policy, and often vote together with the majority.
For example, Democratic MP Alban Zeneli has voted only 17% with the PS, while Democratic MP Rudina Hajdari has agreed 63% with the PS. In the Right-wing Party, these percentages vary between 0–100%, while the Independent Group mostly votes with the PS. All this indicates a lack of a coherent vision of the parliamentary opposition, and therefore susceptibility to the influence (and money) of the Socialist Party.
Besides Tom Doshi (PSD), Gjetan Gjetani (former PS), and PDIU MPs Lala Reme and Elena Xhina, former PD MP Nikolin Staka, LSI MP Lefter Koka, and former LSI MP and Ramazan Gjuzi have consistently (100%) voted with the PS.
Together with the 75 votes of the PS in the currently Parliament, Prime Minister Rama therefore can count on at least 82 votes. This brings him comfortably close to 84 votes needed to elect a new General Prosecutor and 3 members for the Constitutional Court. He has thus been able to create a Parliament fully under his control.
