The DP’s late awakening on the runoff: why did it wreck it itself?

By Ylli Pata

Oerd Bylykbashi, Sali Berisha’s most trusted figure for electoral reform, has declared that the opposition wants the return of the runoff in elections.

To explain it in simple words: if a candidate in an election fails to win 50+1% of the votes, he goes to a second round, where the candidate who wins the most votes then wins.

It looks like a technicality, but it is the essence, because it gives more chances to voters, and even more to those voters who are not glued to and indoctrinated by the ideologies of the dominant groups.

With a runoff, as history has shown, the candidates who win are those who have the support of the centre, of the grey electorate, or of the part that is not ideologically convinced — and that is very important.

France, which is the mother of this system, has been showing us this not for years but for decades. All the candidates for President of France since the fall of the Berlin Wall have the surname Le Pen. In fact they are father and daughter. Jean-Marie Le Pen and Marine Le Pen have been the presidential candidates of France’s conservative and stoic right.

However much the Le Pens have tried to take part of the grey electorate, they have always been defeated in the second round. Because in that round, in many cases, what is chosen is not the best possible option but the lesser evil.

Albania has tried this system, both in parliamentary and in local elections. In many cases (even if few) candidates have won who do not belong to the two big parties, or who are polarising. According to all the historical results, if they are analysed one by one, the winner was always chosen as the most rational or the most unifying candidate.

It was Sali Berisha in 2002, after Edi Rama’s victory as mayor of Tirana, who removed the runoff through an electoral reform in the negotiations he held with the late Fatos Nano.

The election of a joint President such as Alfred Moisiu at that time increased Sali Berisha’s appetite; he won the right to investigate Fatos Klosi, the mayor of Tirana, Edi Rama, and other concessions.

But even with all these favours he received, Berisha could not take the 2003 local elections, in which he invested heavily, not only with lawyer Ngjela but also with his political machine. Naturally it was the clearest case, because whoever takes Tirana also has, and will have, Albania.

Upset by the failure to topple Edi Rama in 2003 — a man who was such a nightmare to him that he sent people to beat him over the head with a lever — he invented a new diabolism, brainwashing even the OSCE ambassador of that time, the Finn Osmo Lipponen, whom Martti Ahtisaari was asking to keep Albanian politics under observation so that no one would come out against the plan that he and the Americans were drafting for Kosovo.

Sali Berisha, as a professional in this trade, understood it and tried to profit, but he acted greedily. The 2001 reform, called Islami-Gjanaj, removed the runoff from the electoral system, because, as it seemed, Berisha had an early pact with Ilir Meta that in a contest between two candidates in a zone, the political split, or schism, would matter. Which is what happened in 2005.

We should recall that at that time MPs were elected directly, with candidates. In 2005, the DP and Sali Berisha profited from the removal of the runoff, but later sank badly, just as they had sunk after 22 March 1992. It is precisely this complex that remained in his mind and later made a mess of the system in the country.

The French-style two-round system is more advanced than the one-round system in the USA and Great Britain, where the vote polarises and all the moderate candidates, or those of the other part, as we might call it, lose. The runoff gives the possibility of a second coalition.

Even though late, this awakening of the DP is a positive step, even if, more than that, it stands to lose everything!