17.6.2011 by ctstmaser.

Albania’s disputed election

Why everyone is sick of Albania

Jun 14th 2011, 16:25 by T.J. | TIRANA

RUNNING into a senior European Union official recently, I mentioned I was going to Albania. He muttered something I cannot repeat here and walked off, apparently irritated even by the mention of the country’s name. You can understand why. On May 8^th the country voted in municipal elections. Over a month later we still don’t know who the mayor of Tirana is. If Albanians can’t even hold a local vote without the risk of violent disruption, think Eurocrats, they should not expect any love from Brussels.

Edith Harxhi, Albania’s deputy foreign minister, concurs. “For me it is extremely depressing,” she says. “The election was the best we have had so far, and there were only minor problems.” (The opposition Socialists would not agree with this rosy assessment.) The net result, says Ms Harxhi, is that “EU integration has stopped for now.”

Here is a simplified summary of what happened in Tirana. People in the Albanian capital voted in four separate elections: city mayor, city council, and the same again for their own part of town.  Edi Rama, leader of the Socialists, has been mayor of Tirana since 2000 and was seeking re-election to the town hall (pictured on the right of the image above).

As the counting neared its end, it became clear that the result was extrmely close. In the end Mr Rama emerged ten votes ahead of his rival,  Lulzim Basha, from Albania’s governing Democratic Party.

The Democrats said that several votes in the ballot for mayor had been cast in the wrong box; if those votes had been counted, they said, their man would have won by 81 votes. The rules seemed unclear. Ballot-counters had been told not to count voting papers placed into the wrong box, but there are no rules in the electoral code covering such cases. Yet the election authorities indicated that Mr Basha was the winner.

The Socialists appealed to the Electoral College, the highest electoral court in Albania. Their case was rejected, but last night another was, partially, successful. Their case rests on the claim that the election authorities changed the rules during the counting, and that under the new court there appear to be more votes in some boxes than there were voters.

Aldo Bumci, chairman of the Democratic Party, describes the Socialist manoeuvring as “artificial manipulation”. If the authorities decide in favour of Mr Rama, says Mr Bumci, “we will accept it,” but he says the party will not concede victory otherwise. “We want every vote to count and Mr Rama does not. That is the difference.”

Mr Rama, for his part, thinks the Democrats are indulging a habit of stealing elections last seen in the 2009 parliamentary vote. “It is daylight robbery,” he says. Albania is stuck because “it does not have free and fair elections.”

As the Tirana vote suggests, Albanians are split down the middle on the issue. Whoever becomes mayor of Tirana will be seen as illegitimate by half the city’s population. And Albania’s stalemate will continue. http://www.economist.com/blogs

EC: Albania in a crossroad
16/06/2011 19:20

Albania is standing in a crossroad, and its fate will be decided by the way the Albanian politicians will chose to follow. The European Commission cannot do anything more than drawing what they see until October 12th. This is the conclusion of the Head of Unit for Albania and Montenegro at the Directory for Enlargement, Marta Garcia Fidalgo, during the inter-parliamentary meeting that was held yesterday in Brussels. Top Channel secured a part of the final messages that were given out of the public eye. The Albanian representatives were valued for their civilized behavior, despite the prolonged crisis of the two-year debate about free votes.

“The role of the Commission is only to ease the process. But it is not us who will do it. We cannot help you if you don’t help us. We referred the Progress Report during the entire meeting, but we have done this in other meetings too. The Commission has its hands tied. The Progress Report is only a real tableau. The reality is made by you, we only make the tableau. There’s nothing more than this. If you want another tableau, change the reality. My direct comment for you would be: try to be politically generous with your self, your parliamentary group and for the generations to come. Make real the dream of being full EU members. This is up to you. You are in a key moment, at a crossroad, and it is up to you to chose the way that you will be following”, Fidalgo declared.

“My personal thanks go to all of you. You kept your word. As you know, I asked you to not be harsh and to not hurt anyone, but to be civilized, to avoid personal offences. And I thank you for this. I wish you all the best. You do not return in Tirana with a pre-made receipt to solve the problems, because that would be too much. But at least I think that this is useful”, underlined Eduard Kukan, head of the European Parliament delegation for Balkan.

The next meeting between the Albanian Parliament members and those of the European Union is set in 24 and 25 November, in Tirana.

Macedonia - Balkan culture wars

Here comes the equestrian statue

Jun 14th 2011, 14:22 by T.J.

 BRACE yourselves. As I noted last week, Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, boasts a giant plinth destined to support a yet-more giant equestrian statue of Alexander the Great. Today residents of Skopje got their first glimpse of the statue, which is currently lying in pieces around the plinth. According to our colleagues at Balkan Insight, the 12m-high bronze was cast in an Italian foundry and will take ten days to assemble.

For two decades Macedonia has been in dispute with Greece over its name. Greece contends that the name “Macedonia” implies territorial ambitions over that part of historic Macedonia which is now part of Greece. The Greeks also say that the Macedonians want to steal their Hellenic identity for themselves—exhibit A, the “appropriation” of Alexander.

The name issue, which has halted Macedonia’s accession to both the European Union and NATO, has caused much vexation for friends of the two countries. In many international fora, such as the EU, Greece has been able to impose the use of the clunky formulation “the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” (FYROM). Plenty of Greece’s friends regarded this as unreasonable.

Now, with Greece caught up in a debt crisis, you might expect the Macedonians to attempt to gain the upper hand by striking a more mature attitude. But no. Not only are they in the midst of renaming airports, motorways and other structures after Alexander or his father, they are now about to erect what amounts to a giant bronze middle finger aimed at Greece. The Alexander statue has undermined friends of Macedonia who have previously sought to defend the country against the Greeks. (The monument is part of the grandiose Skopje 2014 project, which we wrote about here.)

Macedonians are split over the issue. But most agree that it has done Nikola Gruevski, the newly re-elected populist prime minister, no harm at all to be seen as standing firm against the Greeks. It will be interesting to see now whether the Greeks go apoplectic or decide to play it cool. (The government does, after all, have one or two other things to worry about.) As for the Macedonians, they will no doubt respond to any whiff of Greek anger by pointing to an equestrian statue of Alexander in Edinburgh.

Incidentally, this silly row does at least underline one thing. Just as the western Balkans, following the accession to the EU of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, are gradually being reabsorbed into Europe, Greece, which was separated from the Balkan mainstream after the second world war, is being reintegrated into it.  http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2011/06/balkan-culture-wars

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