From the "Oak System" to the unequal race of May 11: How new MPs will be elected

Sometime in July 2001, the elections had been held, but they had not been completed. A photo that will probably go down in history, if anyone bothers to study the history of elections, appeared in the newspapers of the time. In the photo, the then leader of the Socialist Party, Fatos Nano, spoke from an improvised podium. Above his head, a sign of the communist era model read “PTT Bubullimë”. It was this sign that exposed the location and type of legal and electoral nonsense that was discussed at length.

The Socialist Party had pinned its hopes on winning a governing mandate with three-fifths of the parliament on a widely criticized scheme, in which, in one of the areas of Albania, area number 60 and known as Dushk, Lushnje, which also includes the village of Bubullimë, was supposed to vote in such a way as to produce a full 11 mandates of deputies, 6 percent of all mandates, even though the area in question constituted only 1% of all voters in the country.

Newspapers at the time nicknamed this maneuver the "Oak System," an epithet to describe how unscrupulous political machinations distort the will of voters by giving a particular party more power than the citizens have given it.

In the 2001 elections, the Socialist Party received 41 percent of the vote and 73 seats, or 52% of parliament.

It has been several years now that the Albanian media landscape is no longer vibrant enough to create such labels for political manipulations, so the current system created last year by a new agreement between the DP and the SP with closed and open candidate lists has not received any such allegorical label.

However, the May 11 race is expected to be deeply unequal and concentrated among members of the same party who clash for a few seats within the open list.

Unequal competition

Socialist MP Erion Braçe declared on Sunday in a social media post that the race in which he is participating is “unequal.” This is in fact a conclusion that, probably, comes too late.

In fact, since 2008, when Rama, at the time leader of the opposition, and Berisha, at the time prime minister, agreed on the closed-list system, the DP and the SP have created with the force of their votes a deeply unequal electoral system with a competition dominated by the two political leaders and with a parliamentary force increasingly loyal to them.

In 2008, Berisha and Rama divided Albania into 12 regions and set a threshold of 5% to avoid the risk that small parties could win mandates in the Tirana Region, the only large region where the 5% threshold made sense, because in the other regions, the number of mandates is so low that, even if it gets 5% of the votes, i.e. crosses the threshold, it gets zero mandates.

This was the system by which Albanians voted in the 2009 and 2013 elections, while in the 2017 elections, the country's three major parties competed separately, while Rama won the first single-party governing mandate since 1997.

In 2021, the unilateral changes to the Electoral Code, which Rama made with the votes of the so-called new opposition, created the system with closed lists, but with a favorable vote, a system in which the citizen chose a party and then gave a vote to one of its candidates. This favorable vote did not significantly determine which of the candidates would go to parliament, this was determined by the respective mayors, but it nevertheless served as a form of accounting for each candidate's electoral machinery.

Open and closed lists

Compared to the closed lists of the 2009, 2013 and 2017 elections, as well as the closed lists with a favorable vote of 2021, this year's electoral system seems to be even more extreme. Albanians will be invited to vote for a specific party, and a candidate, but the deputy they will send to parliament will be someone else, who will not be voted for but is "appointed", theoretically by the respective party but practically by the sitting president.

On the ballot paper they will have a second list of candidates, who, for the most part, will not go to parliament. This is a scheme that clearly favors the two presidents again in two ways; first, that their ability to control the parliamentary groups is complete, and, second, that the electoral machines based on “public corruption” or political clientelism are in full competition with each other to secure additional electoral mandates and, consequently, the future parliamentary majority.

The ballot paper approved by the CEC will have two sections, a section at the top where the names of the candidates from the closed lists will be found and another section where the lists of candidates in the open race will be found. The citizen will have to choose, for example, candidate no. 37 on the list of party X, while his vote will send to parliament, not the candidate chosen by him, but the first candidate from the closed list, who has been appointed by the president.

In Tirana, there are 37 candidates for each party on the open lists, but if the Socialist Party repeats the success of 2021 and receives 18 mandates, i.e. more than half, then 12 mandates are assigned by the mayor while the other 37 candidates compete in practice for only 6 seats.

In the opposition ranks, if the result does not change and it wins the 17 mandates that the DP and LSI received when they competed separately four years ago, then 12 are assigned by Berisha, while the remaining 5 mandates are in the race to be won by the 37 candidates on this party's open list. In short, regardless of whether the respective SP or DP voters may like one or the other candidate, those who go to parliament are people whose names on the voting list cannot be voted for.

If, for the candidates of the big parties on the open lists, the competition is unequal to the point of absurdity, for the small parties the competition is even more unfair. These parties, regardless of whether they claim to get 1, 2 or 5 deputies and regardless of whether they claim to get these deputies in a certain district, in order to gain the right to compete, must fill all districts with candidates with full lists.

Prime Minister Edi Rama on Monday mocked a small party whose leader has run for office, including his father. It is likely that this was not because of Adriatik Lapaj’s father’s claims to a parliamentary seat, but for the simple reason that the Rama-Berisha duopoly has imposed on all parties, no matter how small, the absurd legal obligation to run with full lists. While the two major parties can lure candidates for losing seats, not with the opportunity to become MPs, but with the promise of access to the clientelistic system of these parties, the smaller parties have no choice but to fill their lists as best they can. For example, in 2017, a small party called MEGA, (Greek Ethnic Minority for the Future), caused naive laughter when it ran almost a village neighborhood, most of them with the same surname, for MPs across Albania. This party, which, as its name suggests, aims to represent the Greek minority of Albania, which mainly resides in the Gjirokastër and Vlorë districts, was forced to find candidates in Kukës, Dibër or Shkodra, where it had no real intention of competing.

However, a decision by the Constitutional Court meant that in these elections, for the first time, there will be no threshold for small parties, which, at least in the Tirana Region, will have a real chance of winning mandates. Currently, there are at least five new parties that are competing with the claim to win mandates. The assumption that can be made based on the results of the 2021 elections is that these parties need between 12 thousand and 17 thousand votes to win a mandate. But if the five receive, say, 10 thousand votes each, despite the fact that their 50 thousand votes constitute almost 12% of all votes cast in Tirana, their votes are wasted.

The mandates lost from the "burnt votes" of small parties go to the big parties.

For example, in the 2021 elections, the Socialist Movement for Integration Party came out without a mandate in the Durrës, Korçë, Berat and Vlorë districts, due to a small number of votes missing. This is known as the bias of the D-Hondt formula, which is used to calculate mandates, a formula that favors the largest party, awarding additional mandates even for a single vote. For example, in the 2021 elections, the Socialist Party received one deputy mandate for every 10,244 votes received, while the DP received one deputy for every 10,716 votes and the SMI received one deputy for every 27 thousand votes. The Social Democratic Party even challenged the formula itself when it managed to receive three mandates with only 35 thousand votes or one mandate for every 11,800 votes.

Votes for small parties, or the so-called Protest Votes, have not been lacking during past elections, but these votes have not brought a valid electoral result for the governing majority to date. The situation may change this time. If five small parties manage to obtain five or more mandates in the Tirana Region, where they have the greatest chances, the governing majority may change and the PD-PS political duopoly established in 2008 with the Rama-Berisha agreement on closed lists may enter the path of rupture./ reporter.al