Over 70% of the future deputies will appoint the chairpersons

2024-07-24 22:53:00, Aktualitet CNA

Over 70% of the future deputies will appoint the chairpersons

Edi Rama, Prime Minister

The country's two main political parties, the Socialist Party in government and the Democratic Party in opposition, seem to have agreed to keep the vast majority of MP mandates with closed lists even in the upcoming parliamentary elections scheduled for 2025, while voters of each party will be able to elect less than a third of the candidates with a favorable vote.

DP and SP agreed to change the Electoral Code of the country, a compromise that is expected to materialize tomorrow in the plenary session. Among other things, the parties agreed that "one third" of the lists of candidates will be "fixed" ie closed, while for two thirds of the list the voters of each party will be given the right to give a favorable vote. But if the election results of 2021 are taken into account, this type of wording means that over two-thirds of the elected deputies will be on these closed lists, while less than one-third will be on the open lists.

The formula says that in an electoral area, the word comes, in Kukës, where there are three mandates of deputies, each party will determine a third, i.e. 1 mandate, as the will of the party, while the second mandate can be up to the voters to determine . In the 2021 elections, in Kukës, the Democratic Party won 2 mandates while the Socialist Party won 1 mandate. If this result will be in 2025, or if the SP gets 2 mandates and the DP, 1, then two elected deputies will have been appointed by the party and 1 by the voters. The situation changes if, in a district like Kukësi, a third political force wins a mandate. In this case, the three elected candidates will have been appointed by the respective party, while the electors with their preferential vote will send zero winning candidates to the parliament.

In all other districts it is a similar situation. The word comes, in Shkodër, 11 deputies' mandates were divided in 2021 into 5 PD mandates, 2 SP mandates, 2 PSD mandates and 1 LSI mandate. In the event that in the past elections, voting would have been done according to today's formula for the lists, the only deputy who would be elected with a favorable vote by the voters would be the fifth deputy of the Democratic Party. Because dividing the total of 11 mandates by three gives the number 3.66 and the proposed draft law on the electoral code determines that in this case, the number of mandates assigned by the party is rounded to 4. This means that 2 mandates of the SP, 4 mandates of the DP, 2 mandates of PSD and 1 mandate of LSI are appointed by the party.

BIRN calculations made with the election result of 2021 and with the new list formula show that over 100 MPs out of 140 can emerge from the closed lists while the rest, from the consent of the voters.

Closed lists of candidates were established for the first time in Albania by the agreement between Edi Rama and Sali Berisha in 2008. Closed lists are not automatically bad in themselves but experience has shown that, due to the lack of democratic culture within the parties big or small Albanian, the elected deputies are the result of the will of the respective president and not of the party membership, making the parliament an institution filled with the appointees of the president and not with deputies representing the people.

The system has been described as a "republic of presidents" in which the parliament has lost its constitutional function as supervisor, controller and limiter of the executive power, turning into a notary office of the prime minister.

In the 2021 elections, after numerous protests regarding this system, Edi Rama agreed to create a popular vote system, which in practice produced only three parliamentary mandates in the entire country resulting from the consent of voters, while 137 of the others came out again by the will of the chairman. This is because the candidates of the losing list would have to break the "hersin", a mathematical habit that meant the need to win over 10,000 personal popular votes, to be able to replace one of the predetermined candidates as the winner./ Reporter.al