Albania’s chances of being embraced by the EU are dwindling
painted with the word “Ik” drift across the evening sky. Waving red Albanian flags emblazoned with its double-headed black eagle, as well as European Union and American ones, the crowd chants “Rama Ik! Rama Ik! Rama Ik!” Since February, in a series of mass protests, the opposition has been demanding that Edi Rama, the prime minister, must—in one word—go. During such raucous demonstrations, firecrackers and paint bombs are regularly hurled at his office.
But its chaotic politics mean that Albania looks increasingly ill-qualified to join the club. On June 30th elections for mayors and municipal councils are meant to take place. Mr Rama says they will go ahead, though President Ilir Meta has said he has cancelled them because of the situation. The electoral college backs the government but Mr Basha says the elections are illegal and is boycotting them.
If the elections do go ahead, Mr Basha’s party will lose the jobs and patronage that local government confers. At the same time the parliament, in which Mr Rama’s Socialist Party has a narrow majority, has begun moves to impeach President Meta. The law, says Erion Veliaj, the Socialist mayor of Tirana, the capital, is “very clear. If you try to stop people voting, you go to jail.”
Mr Basha has been trying to prove that Mr Rama was helped by organised-crime bosses to win the last general election, in 2017. Mr Rama denies it and says he will sue the journalist who is making the allegations in a German paper. On June 17th Mr Basha was in his turn called to answer allegations about illegal party financing. Mr Basha says the charges are false.
In 1997 there was a complete collapse of law and order in Albania when citizens seized tanks and forced the then president, Sali Berisha, Mr Basha’s mentor, to resign. Democracy has enough of a foothold to make this very unlikely to happen again; all the same, politics in Albania is a nasty business. The main parties are tied to clans with unsavoury connections. Mr Basha claims that the enemies of organised-crime bosses allied to the Socialists have made overtures to him, which he has rebuffed.
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