It is not the voting technique that is the problem, but the technique of making the vote

By Ylli Manjani

The DP has brought back into public attention the issue of bringing back the run-off (balotazh) in the election of municipal mayors.

The DP once fought hard to remove the run-off from the electoral law and achieved its goal. But that does not necessarily make today’s proposal wrong.

Setting the condition that a candidate in a majoritarian race must win an absolute majority, 50%+1 of the votes, is a matter of democratic standard. Not every state applies it and there is no single model, but the logic is understandable. When a person is elected to run a municipality alone, it is reasonable to require that he have behind him the real majority of those who voted.

So, as a standard, the run-off is debatable but also legitimate.

But the DP’s problem today must be sought in the political dimension.

The DP and the Albanian opposition want the run-off not for the standard, but as a technical reserve tool. The opposition tends to appear in elections with the vote fragmented among several candidates, while the SP usually appears alone. In a single-round system, this naturally favours the single candidate against several candidates competing for the same electorate.

That is why the DP seeks the second chance that the run-off offers.

The hope is that its candidate remains in the race in the second round and the votes of the other opposition candidates unite around him.

Technically, it is a completely legitimate request.

Politically, it hides the much bigger problem of the Albanian opposition, which is the loss of the electoral ability to win.

For years the DP has blamed only the voting rules, while their fundamental problem is the loss of contact with the country’s electoral reality.

The opposition has failed to build a broad, stable and expanding social grouping that sees it as its political alternative. It has been left with a traditional core of voters, ever harder to expand and, for demographic and political reasons, ever less sufficient to win.

But more problematic than this reality is the refusal to recognise it.

I remember almost no serious public poll that the DP has accepted when it did not like the results. Polls have been cursed, attacked, delegitimised and declared manipulated. And this has happened even when the elections afterwards confirmed, more or less, the tendencies they had warned about.

This is no longer simply distrust of polls. It is a refusal to recognise the society you seek to represent.

How can you represent a society you refuse to recognise?

Both the polls and the elections of recent years have shown the phenomenon of wear that the opposition must study seriously. The wear of power has not automatically translated into growth of the opposition. On the contrary, at certain moments, while the SP has lost support from the wear of governing, the opposition has proportionally lost even more.

This is the real alarm.

Because it means it is not enough for the opponent to wear out. Someone has to want to come to you.

Here the voting technique no longer helps the DP, because it has forgotten the technique of making the vote.

The vote is not produced by changing the electoral formula. The vote is made by understanding society. By identifying its interests. By understanding the strata that are being born and those that are disappearing. By talking to the people who do not vote for you, not only to those who applaud you. By understanding why a citizen who is dissatisfied with the government still does not choose you.

The question that should torture an opposition that seeks to come to power is: Why do people who are dissatisfied with the government not come to us?

You cannot win any race with the question of what electoral system we need in order to win with the votes we have.

When you lose the technique of making the vote, there is no electoral system that can save you.

You can introduce a run-off. You can change the formula. You can open or close the lists. You can change the coalitions, the thresholds, the zones or the counting method.

In the end, democracy has a very simple brutality: you have to have votes.

With votes the opponent is beaten, not with offside rules. Let alone by waiting for some blind goal from a procedural muddle.