Political parties suffer from "extreme informality" in Albania

2024-08-25 13:13:00, Politikë CNA

On August 4, Himara Municipality in the south of the country went to the polls to elect a new mayor, following the controversial arrest of Fredi Beler and the loss of his mandate due to his conviction for election corruption.

The race took place between Vangjel Tavos from the Socialist Party and Petro Gjikuria from the opposition coalition, but left the other political parties indifferent.

Out of 131 parties registered in the Court of Tirana, only 11 of them were registered in the Central Election Commission to participate in the elections for the Municipality of Himara. This is a common panorama of electoral processes in Albania, where only a small part of political parties are active and regularly participate in electoral processes.

From the fall of the communist system in 1991 until today, a total of 134 political parties have been registered in the Court of Tirana, but only three of them have been deregistered according to the data provided by the Court of Tirana.

However, according to an audit report of the Central Election Commission, more than 80% of them exist only on paper. The report also found that 107 political parties were in violation of the law, as they did not have an office, an address, and in some cases the leaders had passed away.

Political experts in Albania emphasize that this is an indicator of the high informality of political parties in Albania, while expressing the need to revise the law on Political Parties.

"About 92% of political parties turn out to be informal, so there are neither practical addresses, nor structures, nor opportunities to contact their leaders and leaders, leading to an extreme informality of political parties," Afrim Krasniqi told BIRN. director of the Institute for Political Studies.

The Law 'On Political Parties' was approved in 2000 and gives the opportunity to anyone to create a political party, on the condition that they collect 3 thousand signatures and submit them to the Court of Tirana, along with the party's statute. But the law has no provision for what will happen if the founders leave this political force, or in the worst case, pass away.

Rezart Kthupi, an expert on electoral processes previously engaged with the Democratic Party, also thinks that the law has large gaps and an urgent need for changes. "The main problem of the law is the lack of control. The court is the institution which is set in motion only at the request of the party (political party) and has no control mechanisms over the activity of the political party," said Kthupi.

"In the current form of the law, there is no legal mechanism, be it administrative or judicial, which can assess whether a political party no longer fulfills the conditions required for its registration, or whether it continues to exist, in the sense of the activity of internal party or in terms of political activity," he added.

Political parties in Albania do not only have formal problems, but also in the way they function to guarantee transparency, accountability and the implementation of the statute for internal disputes. According to Kthup, this is not only due to the lack of internal democracy, but also of legal mechanisms.

"The biggest problem of the current law is precisely the lack of evaluation mechanisms whether the statutes of political parties are respected or not," he said, adding that "internal democracy begins with the implementation of the common rules on which the party was founded."

In general, party statutes sanction periodic elections, where mandates vary from 3 to 5 years for all governing bodies, but are these terms respected?

"What usually happens is that, despite the statutory provisions, the vast majority of political parties do not hold periodic elections, precisely because the law has not provided for any instrument, which forces the political party to carry them out. It remains only in the will of the governing bodies of the party to implement the statute or not," emphasized Kthupi.

The current law does not necessarily provide for the registration of the governing bodies of the party, with the exception of the chairman, which, according to Krasniqi, has caused these parties to be ruled by their chairmen.

"The leading individuals, who rule the political parties, treat them as groups of their family, their business, their personal career, their CV and their personal needs," said Krasniqi from the Institute of Studies. Political.

Krasniqi reinforces the need to change the law with the demands of the European Union for Albania, where the country must also answer for the transparency of political parties. But since these "homework" are in the last chapters, Krasniqi is pessimistic that the reformation can be done soon.

"The process of reforming the parties will be distant and unfortunately it is not a top priority even in the international documents referring to Albania, but the only condition remains is that through democracies in the political parties we have democracy in Albania", he concluded./ Reporter.al