As 2015 kicks into gear, Albanians head into an electoral year in which their views on the Socialist-ruling majority will be tested on how they vote for the coalition parties locally. The media will also play a major role in shaping their views, but do Albanians trust their media? (Or, even, should they?)
TIRANA TIMES EDITORIAL
The government has now seen its administrative reform surpass all challenges, including the Constitutional Court, which means it is now legal and the elections will be held based on the new 61-municipality map.
The opposition says it doesn’t recognize the new map, but has failed in all legal challenges to stop it. It has hinted it might boycott the summer administrative elections, but such move likely won’t happen. It would be very bad for the country and ultimately unhealthy for the Democrats themselves.
To be clear, the new map is not without its faults when it comes to elections in particular. One could easily say it has been gerrymandered to aid the Socialists win more mayoral races. In the largest municipality, Tirana, for example, the old district has been carved so the Socialists will likely win the larger and wealthier part, which includes the core of the metropolitan area. The poor neighborhoods to the north, in the Kamza area, largely a result of internal migration from the country’s northern districts and staunchly Democratic, have been grouped together and removed from the larger pool of voters to the south — giving an edge to Socialists in the rest of the district, now turned into one large municipality.
In addition, even when the north’s smaller population is factored in, the map gives more municipalities to the southern part of the country, which tends to lean on the left. However, these calculations are not universal as both major parties run strong national campaigns and it is not unusual for the Democrats to win big mayoral races in the south and for the Socialists or their allies to take the helm in northern municipalities.
Even with the edge from the new administrative map, the Socialists face the reality that by the time the elections come along, there will popular resentment to some of the reforms the central Socialist-led government has implemented. It is not unusual for the party ruling the country to lose in the overall score of mayoral races in administrative elections. But in the Socialists’ case some of the resentment — from those who don’t like to bow down to the rule of law or pay their power bill, for example — is unjustified. In other cases, however, when the government has acted arbitrarily the resentment is warranted.
For example, just last week the government overruled a local Socialist mayor and started demolishing an entire neighborhood in the lakeside village of Hudenisht near the city of Pogradec. It did so with little notice to the residents, and some of the buildings had legal permits. The government says it will legally expropriate those who had permits. The problem with the expropriation the government is twofold. First it is rarely done at the real market value — thus unconstitutional, and second, for a cash strapped government, it is not desirable to spend taxpayer money on demolishing buildings that are not vital to the national interest.
The case in Hudenisht, the government was so arbitrary, it drew the ire of the Ombudsman Office, led by a Socialist-nominated progressive that rarely attacks the government directly unless it involves major human rights violations.
If one is a regular consumer of Albanian media, one had to dig deep to find out about what was happening in Hudenisht, and even then the picture was patchy. The other problem voters face in 2015 is the media environment which has become so deeply fragmented, biased and diluted in quality, people are simply not getting an accurate picture. In addition to turning to social media and getting the propaganda directly from political actors, most media in Albania are doing little more than simply pushing the message of one interest group or the other — no filter, no independent thought allowed. The state of the Albanian media ultimately hurts its mission in society and is leading to a rapid decline in trust in the free press.
While the proliferation of online media means more and more readers, most do little more than consume and produce hate-speech-filled comments in online boards, which as a general rule are unfiltered and unmonitored, resulting in the type of hate speech that is very dangerous to the country’s social cohesion — and is probably illegal under Albanian legislation. Albanian media owners and journalists owe it to their own moral and ethical campus to police hate speech on their online publications and to return to some sense of normal journalism.
