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How the regional proportional system hurts small parties and favors the two major forces...
The recent elections in Albania brought to the political scene several new parties that represented a different spirit, a civic energy, and a clear demand for change.
The Together Movement, the Albania Becomes Initiative and the Opportunity Party entered the race with a clear profile as an alternative to the old elites and the extreme polarization of the SP-PD. All three of these new forces have so far received considerable support at the national level: “ Initiation – Albania Becomes” 37,229 votes, “Opportunity” 30,719 votes and “The Together Movement” 14,231 votes , proving that a significant part of the electorate really wants to go outside the usual tracks of Albanian politics.
But despite this significant support at the national level, each of them managed to secure only one parliamentary mandate, which indicates more about the structural injustice of the electoral system than about the real weight of these forces in society. This system, established with the 2008 pact between Rama and Berisha, has turned the electoral race into an unequal field, where small parties no longer compete for votes, but for numerical miracles in fragmented districts.
Through regional proportional representation, Albania is divided into 12 unequal zones, where the number of mandates varies from 3 in Kukës to over 30 in Tirana, making it practically impossible for small parties to cross the numerical threshold to gain fair representation.
For example, in a district where there are only 4 mandates, to get one MP, a political force must often exceed 20–25% of the votes, which is unattainable for a new force that does not have a clientelistic structure or state logistics like the SP and the DP.
This is how it happens that a party can receive thousands of votes spread across many districts and not translate them into even minimal representation, while a large force with a concentration of votes in a single area receives mandates with even less support at the national level.
This is the essence of the deformation: a system that favors the concentration of power and the survival of old elites, which has closed its historical cycle, but is kept alive through the manipulation of the rules of the game.
The 2008 pact was presented as modernization, but in fact it was an institutional coup against functional democracy – eliminating the real preferential vote, closing the possibility of running outside of the mayoral lists, and raising a de facto threshold much higher than the formal one.
Today, the three new parties that have so far received over 80,000 votes together, have no more representation than one MP each, while this support would translate into at least 6–7 mandates in a national proportional system.
This is a silent political crime that kills hope, devalues the vote, and leads the country towards prolonged political stagnation.
Instead of the system encouraging new ideas and new energy, it condemns them to marginalization, forcing them to survive on the periphery of the system, while the scene remains a duopoly that has gone beyond any democratic control. /Pamphlet
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