FLASH
Shkruar nga Skënder Minxhozi
On this abandoned property, Lapaj, Shabani, Shehaj and Qori are trying to build their success so far, this too to be verified on May 11th.
There is a third column in the tables that the various pre-election polls show in the main media, about the vote preference of Albanians on May 11. It is the space that what are seen as “new parties” are starting to occupy. Four political movements, grouped into three electoral entities, are receiving between 10 and 15 percent of the vote preference in the most recent polls.
At first glance, this is the distinguishing element, the novelty of these elections. But in fact, behind this hopeful curtain lies a different truth than what the change enthusiasts are trying to sell.
We are de facto witnessing the first act of the collapse of the 34-year-old partyocracy. This is the novelty of these elections. A collapse that is not coming with noise or a storm. Even less with alternatives that fill the squares and shake the political system to its foundations. It is a collapse inside the roof, more than a spectacular explosion of the building. It is coming gradually in the form of the irreversible fading of a number of historical symbols and the decline of public trust and boredom towards an elite that has served its time. This decadence is also coming through the slow but continuous advancement of investigations and sentences that are being given to state and party officials of all levels. It is a process that has so far affected only one side of the traditional political panel, that of the official opposition PD-PL and their smaller allies.
On this abandoned treasure, Lapaj, Shabani, Shehaj and Qori are trying to build their success so far, this too to be verified on May 11. A decade or so ago, Bamir Topi and Kreshnik Spahiu entered the playing field precisely to break the aforementioned three-party monopoly. They did not succeed, just as half a dozen parties and movements with very well-known names and faces in Albanian politics had not succeeded since the beginning of pluralism.
Regularly in the last 30 years there have been attempts to break the PS-PD duopoly at the top of Albanian politics. They have been often serious attempts, initiated by politicians with experience and a will for change. In many cases, they have also been people untainted by corruption and crime. But they have all failed, except for Ilir Meta who managed to penetrate between the two major parties with the SMI in 2004. No one else has succeeded because the major parties were still strong, majestic and inevitable.
The truth of what is happening before our eyes is that a wing of the Albanian political house is quietly collapsing, as we have known it for over 20 years. First, the former LSI, today the Freedom Party, has fallen noisily. The party once owned by the Meta-Kryemadhi couple, the political force that regularly made or broke majorities, has been a serious electoral factor, so much so that in the past decade it managed to approach the quota of 20 deputies in the parliamentary elections. Even in the last political elections in 2021, Monika Kryemadhi and, more distantly, Ilir Meta from the office of the President of the Republic, managed to receive 107 thousand votes or 6.81 percent of the total proportional vote. Only the electoral system penalized the LSI by leaving it with a quota of four mandates in the Assembly.
Today, this party is practically paralyzed, with Chairman Meta in isolation and the couple officially divorced. The pillar that held the party afloat and justified its very existence has fallen, while those remaining in the party have neither the substance nor the iron will that Iliri and Monika once had.
A similar story of shrinkage, but for different reasons, has also been suffered by the Democratic Party itself, based on the figures released by the polls of recent weeks. If in 2021 Lulzim Basha managed to get almost 40 percent of the proportional vote, today the position of the party led by Berisha is dramatic. The public beating in the DP courtyard on January 8, 2022 of many of those who are now side by side was the first serious symptom that this political force was heading towards the abyss. Berisha's return to the 2025 race makes the futility and lack of perspective for the largest party of the Albanian right even more noticeable.
Four years after the 2021 elections, the Alliance for a Greater Albania, which lists 24 political parties, including the Freedom Party, is understood in the country's main polls to be between 33 and 37 percent of the national proportional representation. A drop of more than ten percentage points compared to 2021, when Basha and Kryemadhi led the Albanian opposition.
Currently, the Democratic Party, once held in check by Sali Berisha, has "produced" a mosaic of acronyms that emerged from it or former allied parties, which see Berisha himself as the main problem of the opposition. It has also left a mountain of disappointed votes without a leader. So much so that in the 2023 local elections, this opposition only won seven of the 61 municipalities in the race!
Seen this way, the truth of these elections lies more in the disintegration of the official historical right that made this process possible than in the fact that three or four new politicians came out and suddenly won 10 or 15 percent of the voters. First, to be realistic, some of the "new" faces are not so new, and second, more than political projects, these are challenges from people who are seeking to obtain their own parliamentary mandate on May 11. Not to mention the fact that they are arguing and leaving nothing unsaid to each other.
The current success of these new parties is dedicated to the fact that while one wing of the political elite, the SP and Rama, are keeping their numerical quotas intact, the other wing, that of Berisha and Meta, are giving up a large portion of the electorate that they had until the last parliamentary elections.
Lini një Përgjigje