In a repetition of arguments familiar to anyone who remembers the Constitutional Reform of 2008, Prime Minister Edi Rama argues that the Albanian electoral system allows small parties to take the state hostage.
In an interview with Eni Vasili, Rama stated:
We have a system that has been built not in these 4 years, but in 20-something years, where the small parties have had access the governance as a result of the possibilities that were given to them by the vote to determine the government. With their numbers they have taken the state hostage, not of the prime minister. They have taken offices, agencies, inspectorates to employ their people. This is something that has to do with a system that doesn’t manage to serve the people.
Prime Minister seems to imply that if the government were run by a single party (his party), there would be no more crippling nepotism of the “small parties,” in which he seems to include the LSI.
Election data from 2001 show clearly that already in 2008 the “small parties” were delivered a devastating blow by the reform that instituted pre-electoral coalitions, reinforcing the PS and PD. To argue that these severely weakened parties would have held the state “hostage” is an exaggeration.
Rama further declared:
I am not against small parties in the sense of participating, but coalitions need to be made like outside Albania. In Germany they stay for months in negotiations about the program, whereas here the program comes second, while [negotiations] sessions are based on the division of directorates.
Rama’s argument here assumes that Albanian parties would have a party program, and that this program is the basis of governance. This is neither the case for the PS nor for the other parties, which have repeated their promises from 2013, rather than actually formulating a realistic party program, discussed and voted within the broad party base.
