FLASH
Shkruar nga Lorenc Vangjeli
The SP and the DP took a different approach on their way to the ballot boxes.
What was only a logical projection was verified on the electoral field and what is feared to be hypocritical politics in Albania could be confirmed in the space of three weeks. The CEC's decisions to open the ballot boxes in Tirana and Fier, a gigantic rechecking exercise involving more than half a million votes sealed in the boxes, risks providing further proof for skeptics who see politics as a problem to be solved rather than a means to solve problems.
While all likelihood is that the votes of political parties will remain unchanged, with exceptions resulting from human errors, preferential votes for open list candidates promise big surprises, giving life to the old axiom that war within the species is the wildest war. In a country where everyone accuses the other of being a thief, the verification in practice of the deformation of the ranking of candidates, mainly in the two major parties, the Socialist Party and the Democratic Party, could shed a lot of light on an always gloomy picture of the electoral processes in Albania. Paradoxically, the enigmatic elections of 2009, which the socialists strongly contested and even opposed with hunger: Open the boxes or leave, a decade and a half later could turn into elections that verified problems because the boxes could not be kept closed.
The SP and the DP had a different approach on their way to the ballot boxes. Rama had a clear goal to move from the promised rebirth of his party in 2013 to the reinvention of a new party in 2025 in the span of 12 years. To this end, he initially brought the people he wanted to his lists and threw the rest of the veterans onto the open lists. With a few rare exceptions, what is still inherited from the traditional party will follow the next Parliament on television.
Their place will be taken by ambitious young men and women, often without any clear public profile, but who did not carry any of the old and new sins of socialist governance. Moreover, Rama kept all local preferences among the candidates under iron control. When the vote counting process began, a personal message on his audio was transmitted to the army of counters. And yet, the recount of votes in Tirana and Fier, and probably also in Durrës later, may be problematic for some characters, but in the big basket, this issue will not be a problem for Rama. Someone, a well-known character, may see his triumph fade, and somewhere else, Zeqineja may replace Zeqineja. And here the damage ends with only a few martyrs who will prove once and for all that reason can never quench the hunger of greed.
Convinced that what he had to choose, he had chosen by sheltering it in the safe lists, Berisha had little room to act. He probably neither encouraged nor opposed the possibility that his counters would have a hand in the exchange of votes within his party's list. After all, it was a question of only half a dozen candidates who would enter the Assembly from the open list. Moreover, at the moment when it had become clear that the defeat was profound, the demoralization of the counters, verified in every corner of Albania, had every chance of finding a superficial consolation in the trafficking of votes within the DP list.
In Tirana and Durrës especially, this battle is quite big and the resentment within the group is even bigger than the disappointment with the result itself. The chances of a change in the ranking are minimal, but they are enough to feed Rama's hunger to attack his opponent: "They accuse us of theft, but they stole from each other!", these are exactly the words he will say after about three weeks when the recount process is over. Thus building the foundations of a new narrative that will attack the electoral code, which will turn into an invitation to rewrite the code in a different way, to change the electoral system and putting on hold the great debate on whether the elections were free and fair.
Then the kismet! The surprises in Tirana do not last long and whoever has been left out of the list will wait for the hopes that SPAK will finally start to crack down on electoral crime to be verified. Not the counters as victims, but others who used the counters as victims. The logic that in Tirana, Fier or Durrës and Shkodër, SPAK has recorded kilometers of conversations about the campaign, if true, could bring the next surprise closer. It has every chance of becoming one of the unbroken links in the cyclical crisis of the entire Albanian society that increasingly finds itself unrepresented by its political class. Even though politics swears by the head of society once every four years!
Lini një Përgjigje