A Clash of Powers, Every Man for Himself, God for All!

By Bajram Peçi

The impatience of the magistrates’ power to flex its muscles at the executive took a disgusting form when they decided to file criminal charges against the Albanian finance minister. He had refused to violate the constitution. Aware that by accepting the mid-year budget supplement, with an impact of 40 million euros — self-awarded salary increases by the justice system — he would be breaking the law without it taking legal form through Parliament. Prime Minister Rama later noted that he and the Justice Minister, who had been consulted on the above stance, should also have been charged. From what is happening, it is plain to see they are divided in aims, even in principles, over the way the state is run — the very reason they exist?!

When you say ‘Governance’, the people understand the household, where the eldest or some other member of the family governs the money? The first described form of governance we encounter comes from the time of Lycurgus of Sparta. With the Lacedaemonian inhabitants Lycurgus established justice through equality and the ‘vote’ of the people, with the peculiarity of the voting form, equal plots of land and the removal of gold and silver coinage from circulation. The system is known to have fallen with Lycurgus’s death, and inequality soon returned, along with the thirst for coins and precious metals.

‘What is justice and is it good for a person to be just?’ was the question Plato asked in his ‘Republic’. It is Socrates who answers the question, saying categorically that ‘Justice in the ideal city is similar to the justice of a person’, in a way, the rule of one person. Although philosophers over the centuries have accepted that in Plato’s ‘Republic’ no one would want to live, they have been unable to refute Socrates’ answer — which we have the privilege as a generation to still savor, seeing it through rulers in the Arab monarchies, in China, in North Korea, in Russia and beyond.

Albanians have been fed up to the neck with this republican system, when they experienced for 45 years the party-state. The Republic was called ‘Popular’, but its leadership was personal. The power of the people had nothing to do with governance, apart from the readiness of all its strata and classes to work in accordance with the decisions of the country’s first man. The justice of this system necessarily had to be party justice; the freedom of the individual was limited to moving and expressing oneself.

Polybius, the historian of antiquity, centuries later describes to us the governance of the Roman Republic ruled by the Roman Senate, the Consuls and the Assembly. Although they are credited with laying the pillars of law, how it went and why it went, until the republic mixed in governance was replaced by the dictatorship of one man, whose power was recognized as emperor and himself as emperor, we know in detail? Its course was exploited by jurists, philosophers and rulers to create governance systems with as few confrontations of powers as possible?

In the English system governance consisted of the King, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, which in 1653 was approved as the constitution of England, consisting of a legislative branch (Parliament) and two executive branches. John Locke, in his work ‘Two Treatises on Government’ (1690), distinguished between legislative, executive and federative power. Locke distinguishes between separate powers, but not between discrete separate institutions. He believed that legislative power was supreme over executive powers because legislative power derives its authority from the people, who have the right to create and to overthrow the legislature.

In these descriptive lines it is also worth mentioning the system of the French enlightener, Montesquieu, to whom the term ‘three-part system’ is attributed. In ‘The Spirit of the Law’ (1748), Montesquieu described the different forms of distribution of political power between a legislature, an executive and a judiciary. He defended a form of governance whose powers were not centralized in a monarch or ruler, so that no one could usurp full power. This is the form of governance that rules today in most republics.

These systems and these proper names, step by step and system after system, formed the legal dividing line between the three powers. Although the judiciary is barred from entering the competences and power of the executive, in Albanian society, deeply divided politically, history is more complex than law. The judiciary convened yesterday and the Administrative Court convened today, through their decisions, are convinced to present themselves to the broad public with the argument that it is the executive that has violated its boundaries, where, among other things, they defend themselves with the Constitutional Court’s decision. No forum or individual responsible for these forums of the justice system bothers to mention the legislative power, through which budget approval — the money — passes. Those who understand the budget, which is easily tangible, know it has two items: revenues and expenditures. From the indicators of these figures emerges the law that determines how far you stretch your legs? How far the blanket reaches, or how far the arrogance of another power demands?

The rush to report the government to SPAK and the Administrative Court’s decision to make payments according to the payrolls that arrived with the increases had no sound reason! They simply had to wait until September 17, the day Parliament takes up the matter. More reasonable would have been sending the old payrolls, as some other justice institution has done!

How much does the courts’ suspension of work — the strike against the executive (it would sound better) — damage Albanian life? The impact, in conditions where a mountain of decade-old files, thousands upon thousands, sleep forgotten, the impact will, I believe, be negligible. The greater damage will come from the misunderstanding: do these powers serve one purpose, the governance of the state, or is one for the nail and the other for the horseshoe?

The true essence of governance must consist of the full reconciliation of wills, tastes, thoughts, the mastery of impulses. A physical man feels better in these circumstances taking a cold shower. Calm down, people!