Albania: Movement towards EU membership - full text
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It was reported in late August that Prime Minister Sali Berisha, whose Democratic Party of Albania (PDS) had narrowly won the recent general elections, had opened negotiations on cabinet personnel for the next four-year term. Local media reported that Berisha had met with Fatmir Mediu, leader of the centre-right PDS's traditional ally, the Republican Party of Albania, and had "found common ground". The PDS was also in consultation with the third member of the coalition, Ilir Meta's Socialist Movement for Integration. In early July, Meta had announced that he had accepted Berisha's invitation to join a government that would be a stabilising factor in Albania's path towards EU membership.
Immediate context
In January 2009, President Bamir Topi had called elections for the Peoples Assembly (the unicameral legislature) to be held on June 28. They were the first to be held under a new electoral system adopted in April 2009. Previously, there had been a mixed electoral system under which 100 of the 140 seats in the Assembly were filled by the "first-past-the-post" system. Under the new system, all members were elected through a proportional representation system. The revised electoral system encouraged small parties to run in coalition with the two main political parties the PDS and the Socialist Party of Albania (PSS) rather than on their own.
In the previous elections held in July 2005, the PDS and its allies had won a total of 73 seats, against 64 for the PSS and its allies. The PDS leader, Sali Berisha, who had served as president between 1992 and 1997, became prime minister. Under Berisha's premiership, the country experienced an annual economic growth of 5 per cent, although this began to slow down in 2009 under pressure from the global financial meltdown. In April 2009 two months before the election Albania joined NATO and formally applied for membership of the EU. During campaigning, both major parties pledged to work towards Albania's accession to the EU, which in turn urged the country to hold free and fair elections. The country introduced a new electronic ID card in an effort to prevent election fraud.
In his campaign, Prime Minister Berisha promised to continue to tackle crime and corruption. The PSS campaign focused on personal criticism of Berisha, although the party also promised to increase agricultural production, reduce poverty and reform the health and educational systems. Two people were killed during the election campaign. However, no violent incidents were reported on polling day. The June 28 elections resulted in a close contest between the PDS, with 68 seats, and the PSS, with 65 seats.
Reaction and outlook
The Socialist Movement for Integration (LSI), led by a former prime minister, Ilir Meta, emerged as the party with greatest influence after the elections, even though it won only four seats. In early July, Meta accepted Prime Minister Berisha's invitation to join him and form a government in order to avert a political crisis. "I want to become a stabilising factor which is going to help Albania integrate into the European Union", Meta stressed, referring to the important role the elections would play in helping the country join the EU.
Both France and Greece have said that they would support Albania's quest for EU membership. However, it appeared highly unlikely that this would happen until 2015 at the earliest. The country's accession could be delayed by fierce internal debate about whether the EU should be enlarged to encompass struggling Balkan countries. Albania's estimated unemployment rate of over 30 per cent had raise fears that accession to the EU would result in mass migration to the union's richer countries.
Running democratic elections was considered a crucial test of Albania's future chances of integration into the EU. The June 28 vote came almost three months after the former Stalinist state joined the NATO military alliance and took its first step towards joining the EU by filing for membership. The main opposition PSS, who came a close second to the PDS, complained of irregularities and fraud in the ballot. Their claims were dismissed by Berisha as "absurd" and international monitors gave the vote cautious praise.
In a statement issued on June 29, the International Election Observation Mission (IEOM) a joint undertaking of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR), the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE PA), the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly (NATO PA) concluded that Albania's election process demonstrated improvements, but also noted that violations persist. The observers said that the elections marked "tangible progress" with regard to the introduction of new voter registration and identification procedures, and the adoption of an improved legal framework. However, the observers also noted that these improvements were overshadowed by the politicisation of technical aspects of the process and violations observed during the campaign which undermined public confidence in the electoral process. Corien Jonker, head of the delegation of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, said: "These elections demonstrated that the Albanian people have the potential for building a democratic society alike that in other European countries. Now there is a huge responsibility of the authorities and main political stakeholders to work hard in order to establish confidence among the citizens for a democratic electoral process". Audrey Glover, head of the long-term election observation mission of the OSCE/ODIHR, said: "The new electoral code agreed to by both main political parties introduced a number of important improvements and safeguards, in particular with regard to voter registration and identification. It is unfortunate that the high level of distrust among parties, the use of official events for campaign purposes and allegations of pressure on voters did not increase public confidence in the election process".
Historical context
Inhabited from Neolithic times, the territory of modern-day Albania from around 2000 BC was home to the Southern Illyrians, whose civilisation was at its height from 750 to 450 BC. Rome subjugated the Southern Illyrians between 168 BC and AD 9, their lands becoming part of the province of Illyricum. Romes decline in the late 3rd century admitted waves of invaders to the Balkans, and by the 7th century the depleted remnants of the Southern Illyrians had taken refuge in the mountains of Albania. Between the 9th and 15th centuries foreign powers (Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia, Epirus and the states of southern Italy) battled for control of Albania and its strategic coastline.
Foreign invasions of Albania effectively divided the country into a Roman Catholic North and an Eastern Orthodox South, and allowed local power to devolve to mutually hostile native chieftains. Ottoman conquest (1385-1417) began a Turkish occupation lasting until 1912. Albanians staged a revolt in 1443-68 led by George Kastrioti (Skanderbeg), but this collapsed on Skanderbegs death. Turkish reconquest of the country featured forced Islamisation, which was unparalleled elsewhere in the Balkans (Albanians were 70 per cent Muslim by the early 18th century). A modern nationalist movement emerged in 1878, when the Albanian League for the Defence of the Rights of the Albanian Nation (suppressed by the Turks in 1881) was established to protest against the cession of Albanian territory to Montenegro by decision of the Congress of Berlin.
Albania became independent during the Balkan Wars (1912-13), but was occupied by various foreign armies during and immediately after World War I. No proper Albanian government was established until 1921, when the countrys borders were also fixed. Thereafter a short period of democracy under the liberal Bishop Fan Noli was ended in 1924 by an invasion from Yugoslavia. The invasion was led by Ahmet Zogu, a conservative Albanian chieftain who proclaimed himself King Zog in 1928. In 1926 Zogu had entered into a defence pact with Mussolinis Italy, giving the latter the right to intervene militarily in Albania, causing Kings Zogs regime to collapse in April 1939 and the crown passed to Italys King Victor Emmanuel. In September 1943 Nazi Germany occupied Albania following Italys retreat from World War II hostilities. However, the Nazis themselves were expelled by partisans in late 1944.
The country suffered considerably during the war, losing some 22,000 men out of her population of about 1,000,000, with many villages destroyed by German and Italian bombing and "reprisals". Albania emerged at the time of the surrender of Germany with a well-disciplined army of 70,000, equipped mainly from British and American sources.
By the time of the expulsion of the Nazis in 1944, the Communist Party of Albania--renamed in 1948 the Albanian Party of Labour (APL)--had emerged victorious from a year-long civil war against various nationalist groups. A communist-dominated provisional government, with Enver Hoxha as prime minister, formally declared Alabania to be a republic in January 1946. In the subsequent four decades Albania remained a hardline Stalinist state. The constitution of 1976 renamed the country the Peoples Socialist Republic of Albania; confirmed the leading role of the APL; and banned private property, religion (Albania had been declared the worlds first atheist state in 1967), foreign military alliances, and foreign economic support. Successive political purges claimed such prominent figures as Mehmet Shehu (since 1954 Hoxhas successor as prime minister) in 1981.
On the international scene, Hoxhas regime pursued an isolationist and extreme hardline foreign policy, involving vicious ideological wrangling with Yugoslavia (1940s), the Soviet Union (1960s) and China (1970s). Following Hoxhas death in 1985, his successor as APL first secretary, Ramiz Alia, maintained the Partys rigid line, although he permitted a limited rapprochement with certain Western countries.
Albania was the last nation in Eastern Europe to undertake the transition from totalitarianism to democracy. The period of transition proved difficult as successive governments tried to deal with high unemployment, a dilapidated infrastructure, and organized crime. In December 1990 the regime bowed to popular pressure and allowed the formation of political parties to compete with the APL. The first party to emerge, the Democratic Party of Albania (PDS), was formed by a group of students and intellectuals at Tirana University in December 1990. The first multiparty elections were held in March 1991 and the APL won a two-thirds majority in the People's Assembly by capturing almost all the seats in the rural areas where over 70 per cent of the country's population live. However, the newly created PDS received overwhelming support in the cities, winning 75 of the 250 seats.
In subsequent elections, most seats were won in March 1992 by the PDS and in May 1996 again by the DPS, which scored an overwhelming victory and emerged with control of 122 out of 140 Assembly seats. The election was characterised by widespread electoral malpractice, intimidation, and in some instances open violence against opposition candidates and supporters. The result of the elections was accompanied by riots in Tirana which subsequently exploded into violent rebellion that engulfed the country for several months. The spark that set off the country's crisis was the collapse of the pyramid schemes in which Albanians had invested an estimated US$1.5 billion. However, the underlying reason for the rebellion was President Berisha's disregard for the rule of law and a persistent pattern of human rights violations by the government. The Berisha administration tolerated the pyramid investment scams and even encouraged people to invest, despite warnings from the international financial institutions. Tens of thousands of Albanians lost their entire savings. In a pattern repeated in a large number of southern towns, rebels broke into military armouries and seized large quantities of guns, ammunition and grenades. Order was only restored following the deployment of an Italian-led multinational protection force.
A snap election was called held in June 1997 in which the opposition PSS won a two-thirds majority in the Assembly. The task faced by the new five-party coalition government was particularly difficult as it had to re-impose the rule of law, fight against the black economy, and clean up the financial mess in order to attract international donors and investors.
In the Assembly elections held in June and July 2001, the PSS emerged as the largest party with 73 seats, against 43 for a coalition led by the PDS. The PDS once again fought the campaign under the leadership of Berisha. Albanian electoral politics has traditionally involved a sharp north-south divide, and the 2001 results reflected this division. The PDS scored a virtual sweep of northern constituencies while the PSS, as usual, did well in southern districts.
Following the elections political feuding virtually paralysed the Albanian government until the middle of 2002 when the European Parliament brokered an agreement between the main political parties which led to the election, in June 2002, of 73-year-old retired army general Alfred Moisiu as the consensus choice for president. After a long period of confrontation, the country entered a phase of political dialogue. By early 2003, however, this unusual consensus had unravelled and Albania returned to its usual fractured politics. Dissatisfaction over issues such as corruption, conflicts over high prices, poverty and human trafficking, brought an estimated 50,000 people to the streets of Tirana in February 2004, calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Fatos Nano.
Further elections to the Assembly took place in mid-2005 and resulted in victory for Berisha, the PDS and its allies. In contrast with previous elections, there were few violent incidents reported, although election observers noted violations of secrecy and numerous disputes over the omission of voters' names from the register. Despite such shortcomings, OSCE observers announced that the elections had shown at least partial compliance with international standards.
The countrys electoral system was changed in April 2008 from a partial majority system to a new system with proportional representation in each of the country's 12 regions as part of a reform package designed to aid Albania's European integration. Other changes approved meant that the prosecutor general would have a fixed five-year term instead of an unlimited one; the Assembly would automatically be dissolved and early elections declared if the government lost a confidence vote; and the majority required to elect the President would be reduced from three-fifths to half of all MPs. The changes were fiercely opposed by small opposition parties, which argued that the new system would make it harder for them to win national representation.
