Election of the Day: Albania

(Note: no hyperlinks here because the blogging site is being weird and not letting me add them properly. Will update tomorrow if I can)

Before diving in, a quick book recommendation. A couple of years ago I read Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi. I’d intended to blog about it but didn’t get around to it, so I’m remedying that oversight here. Ypi was born in 1979 and the book is a memoir of her childhood in communist and 90’s post-communist Albania. (The first time you read a memoir written by someone younger than you feels like a noteworthy “getting old” milestone.) It’s a pretty gripping story (if you’re an anti-spoiler person even for memoirs probably skip the rest of this paragraph) structured to reveal important secrets to the reader at the same point in the narrative they were revealed to her. Those familiar with 20th century Albanian history will likely associate the surname Ypi with Xhafer Ypi, an inter-war politician widely reviled for several reasons, but mainly for being a collaborator with Mussolini’s puppet regime following Italy’s invasion in 1939. As a child, she understood herself to be a happy Hoxha-loving patriot, and was upset when her fellow students taunted her for sharing a name with this traitor when they learned about him in school. She would later come to learn that Xhafer Ypi was, in fact, her great-grandfather, a fact had placed severe restrictions on her father’s career. In fact, her parents were political dissidents who hid that fact, as well as important information about their family history, from their children. They sharply disagreed with each other about politics (her father believed a decent, humane and democratic communism was possible and desirable; her mother admired Margaret Thatcher) but were of like minds about the Hoxha regime and what should happen to it. Everything she thought she knew about her family and her country started collapsing around her and she watched as her family and country started navigating a new strange world in 1991, leading to further disasters and complications, as well as new opportunities for her no-longer regime-disfavored family. Perhaps the strangest of the 90’s Balkans wars, the civil war in Albania in 1997, facilitated her and some of her family fleeing to Italy, where she was able to enroll in college. My fellow political theorists will know Ypi as an important scholar in our field and LSE professor, who has published important work on Kant, Marx, and democratic theory; given her vocation it’s unsurprising that the book is in many ways a mediation on the two different visions of freedom she grew up with, and their practical shortcomings. A fantastic read, highly recommended.

Albania had a unique trajectory among 20th century communist dictatorships. Hoxha, consolidating control as WWII drew to a close, initially closely aligned Albania with Stalin and the USSR as well as Tito’s Yugoslav regime. The latter relationship ended after Tito’s break with Stalin in ’48, and relations with Yugoslavia remained acrimonious and uncooperative as long as that country existed. Albania, unsurprisingly given the treatment of ethnic Albanian areas of Yugoslavia (on today’s map, NW North Macedonia, the Presevo Valley in Southern Serbia and the Ulcinj coastal region of Montenegro), accused Yugoslavia of tainting the great ideals of communism properly understood with the taint of colonialism and imperialism, grotesque perversions of those ideals. (This is a charge they’d later make against the USSR and China as well.) After Stalin’s death, their relationship with the USSR began to strain, as the hardliner Hoxha was appalled by Khrushchev’s alleged turn toward moderation. Relations were formally severed in 1961 and they withdrew from the Warsaw pact. Shortly thereafter, they took advantage of the Sino-Soviet split and looked to Mao as a new patron. This was initially well-received in Beijing but this relationship began to sour in the early 70’s, in part due to Hoxha’s fury that Mao and China were opening up to the West (Nixon’s visit apparently particularly enraged him). By 1978 ties were severed and Albania, having rejected Sarajevo Belgrade, Beijing and Moscow, was on its own. So the story Ypi grew up with in the 1980’s was that Hoxha was the one true heir of Marx and Lenin, and Albania the world’s only remaining authentically communist regime, showing the world how it’s done. It was also the most isolated country in Europe by a wide margin; a typical Albanian knew far less about the rest of the world than anywhere else in Eastern Europe. The economic upheaval of the 90’s was a rough ride, culminating in the conflict of 1997, which was caused in no small part to a large percentage of the citizenry losing most/all of their money in pyramid schemes so outrageous they’d make Bernie Madoff blush. (In the book, Ypi talks about how pretty much everyone in her community hid their money around the house; “investing” as a new modern European thing.)

Albania’s progress has been modest at best in recent years. The Socialist party has been back in power since 2013, and is looking to extend it further, and polling suggests they have a pretty good chance. Their main competition is the Democratic Party, the center-right party that presided over the catastrophes of the 1990’s. Let’s get some good news out of the way before we get to the bad news: both parties are pro-Europe and pro-EU. The incumbent Socialist PM is campaigning on what is probably an unrealistic timeline for EU membership; one of the opposing party’s main critiques of the current government is that their corrupt and anti-democratic practices are likely to hinder accession.

Now that the good news is out of the way, let’s get to the bad news. Counterfactuals are tricky, but it seems very likely that last week we saw elections in Canada and Australia where Conservative parties seemed to be cruising to victory a few months ago, but ended up losing in no small part due to Donald Trump’s presidency. I did not enjoy these victories unambiguously, of course (All things equal, I’d rather Trump rule in a manner that wasn’t so obviously disastrous that it drags down ideologically aligned parties around the world), but it was nonetheless at least someone enjoyable to watch. In Albania, things are a bit different. Let’s first check in with incumbent socialist PM Edi Rama:

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama hailed Donald Trump as “good for everyone,” portraying the president’s abrasive treatment of US allies as an opportunity for a European Union that has lost its way to rediscover its mojo and build its global influence.

Rama’s comments, made in an interview in the capital, Tirana, are striking not just because he is a Socialist who has staked his legacy on taking Albania into the EU by 2030 if he wins next month’s parliamentary elections. 

“When Trump says that God saved him to Make America Great Again, he tells only half of the story,” the prime minister said at his Socialist Party headquarters on Tuesday. “The other half is that He saved Trump also to make Europe wake up and get its act together.”

Yikes. OK, let’s check in on the opposition:

In Albania, Rama is facing a challenge from the center-right Democratic Party led by Sali Berisha, a former president and ex-prime minister. Sanctioned by the US for alleged corruption, Berisha has tapped Chris LaCivita, the former co-manager for Trump’s presidential campaign, to advise on his party’s bid for victory in the May 11 ballot. 

One might be tempted to say something like: Well, at least the Socialists are just saying dumb shit, not actively aligning with MAGA powerbrokers. Alas…

The prime minister has conducted his own outreach to Trump’s inner circle. Earlier this year, Jared Kushner, the US president’s son-in-law and first-term adviser, won preliminary approval from the Albanian government for a $1.4 billion luxury resort on a former military base. 

The green light for the Sazan Island project off Albania’s southern coast, near where the Adriatic and the Ionian Seas meet, came days before Trump’s January inauguration. It’s become one of the marquee projects planned by Kushner in the Balkans, which include a planned Trump Hotel in the Serbian capital of Belgrade.

Rama, an artist and former basketball player, denied his government’s approval for the project was an attempt to curry favor with the US president. Kushner first visited the island in 2021 together with his wife, Ivanka Trump, and Grenell, he said. 

Oh boy. I genuinely don’t know who to root for. The electoral system (multimember PR districts with between 3 and 37 seats) is at least somewhat open to smaller parties but the generally don’t get much traction, and in fact the shift to PR has seen the two major parties become more dominated by individual leaders. Current composition of parliament is 76 Socialists, 50 Democrats, 14 other. Polling has the Socialists up by low double digits, as they’re polling in the high 40’s and the Democrats in the mid-30’s, but people don’t seem to think there’s much reason to put much faith in them. An additional wrinkle in this election: it’s the first time Albania has allowed diaspora voting. That means a whole lot of potential new voters, which may be a boost for new parties:

More than thirty years after the introduction of political pluralism in Albania, the country’s expatriates will, for the first time, have the right to participate in the country’s parliamentary elections. The inaugural vote is set for Spring 2025, with eligible voters in the Albanian diaspora being able to cast their vote by mail.

At the end of July 2024, Albania’s Parliament passed several amendments to the Electoral Code with bipartisan support, including the introduction of a limited form of absentee voting for citizens living abroad. This move, though delayed beyond the prescribed deadline, followed a Constitutional Court ruling that obligated the Parliament to guarantee emigrants their right to vote.

Amid the vast array of issues that Albania’s electoral processes can offer, the question of diaspora voting has been a subject of intense, albeit sporadic, debate over the past decade. The main political parties have been accused of deliberately delaying what is widely seen as a constitutional right, while many have voiced strong opposition to granting the right to influence the country’s democratic processes to individuals who allegedly “withdrew their contribution” to their country–Albania.

Fears of injustice are, however, largely unwarranted, as they unduly exclude the socio-political and economic contributions the diaspora has made to Albania since the 1990s. For instance, according to the Bank of Albania, 23 percent of households in the country rely on remittances, highlighting the significant role the diaspora plays in the national economy by infusing millions of dollars directly into the country’s economy. It is such and similar data, including diaspora-led foreign investments, that render the notion of “withdrawal” inherently misguided.

There seem to be some fears that the diaspora voting procedures are deliberately difficult, which may reduce the participation rate. Presumably we’ll know more soon enough; it’s already Sunday morning in Tirana and voting is underway. The diaspora is quite substantial, relative to Albania’s population, so this could lead to major changes in Albanian politics, whether now or down the road.