Today Ilir Meta is expected to become the new President of Albania. Thus he will become the seventh president of post-communist Albania and without a doubt the weakest compared to his predecessors. The weakest not because of his political stature (after Sali Berisha, who was president from 1992–1997, he is certainly the most impressive personality),
Last night 23:59 was the legal deadline for the registration of electoral coalitions at the Central Election Commission (KQZ). Yesterday, the PS and LSI sent a letter to the KQZ requesting an extension of the deadline, with the argument that they were still “negotiating” with the PD, and that “stretching the deadlines mandated by art. 64
There is a moment in Adam Curtis’s documentary Bitter Lake in which the narrator (Curtis) talks about the ideals that brought both the Soviets and Americans to Afghanistan: to create a state based on their respective principles and ideologies, to create an ally in the region, to change the country in their likeness. But, Curtis concludes ironically, little did
After the recent visit of former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh to the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), US Senator John McCain has also paid a visit to the Iranian resistance movement, which has resettled in Albania from Iraq after a deal between former Prime Minister Sali Berisha and the US government. Last Friday, Senator McCain met with
At the end of 2006, Edi Rama decided not to enter the local elections, to be held on January 20, 2007, unless three non-negotiable conditions were fulfilled, one of them being the postponement of the elections: The postponement of elections in order to give more time to the citizens to verify their names on the
An electoral assembly that turns into an arena of flattery for the boss and messages that are repeated over and over. This is the way in which we can summarize what happened at yesterday’s assembly of the PS. Only Gramoz Ruçi, whose infallible instincts saw bears down the road to the elections in June, seemed worried and prepared for
Another archeological zone in Albania is being destroyed by construction work. In the Castle of Tirana, qualified as class A archeological zone, construction has started of a complex of one-storey shops. The project is called “Tirana Bazaar.” The Rama government has undertaken a series of decisions that made the construction work in one of Tirana’s
Will there be an agreement between the opposition and the majority to clear the way toward the elections and return the country to normality? Have there been attempts to bring the parties closer together on shared issues, at the moment that both are barricaded in positions that hardly resemble each other? These are the basic
Postponing the elections is nothing new for Albania. The stories of organizing early elections, abandoning or not recognizing the election process, make up the ugly mosaic of our inability to organize normal elections, or the inability to recognize and accept defeat. The story of free elections in Albania starts with an agreement to postpone them.
Authoritarian sentiments are rapidly spreading through the region. On April 16, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is holding a referendum that would ratify the establishment of a dictatorship in all but name. In Macedonia, the insistent refusal of President Gjorgje Ivanov to give Zoran Zaev’s parliamentary majority a mandate to form a government – under the