TIRANA, ALBANIA — With parliamentary elections approaching on Sunday, many Albanians say they feel like Hysen Demiraj, a 45-year-old driver and former political prisoner, who was born in a jail cell during Albania’s brutal dictatorship and says he still feels imprisoned in a country that is unfairly isolated and ostracized.
“We Albanians are tired of feeling cut off from the world,” he said on a recent day after waiting for hours in scorching sun for a German visa, one among a small army of visa-seekers. “We are the forgotten part of Europe and it doesn’t feel so good.”
The intense alienation might seem surprising given that this poor, southern Balkan country joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April — a moment of enormous symbolic and psychological resonance for a place severed from the west for more than 40 years under the Stalinist leader Enver Hoxha.
Yet Albanians clamor for more. Young and old say they want Albania to join the European Union so they can travel freely to neighboring Greece or Italy, without long visa lines or sneaking in under the cover of night — as hundreds of thousands have done since 1990.
Others are fed up in a country where Amnesty International says more than 18 percent of the population is estimated to live below the poverty line of $2 a day, and adequate healthcare often depends on a bribe.
Whether the election is peaceful, free and democratic, analysts and diplomats say, will help determine the progress toward international rehabilitation. Albania’s recent application for E.U. membership already faces deep skepticism; the bloc is overextended and fears admitting lawlessness through the back door. Washington, meanwhile, which lobbied hard for Albania’s NATO membership, will be deeply embarrassed if the vote goes awry.
Nearly every election here since the fall of communism in 1991 has been contested, with losers accusing winners of vote-rigging or worse.
Audrey Glover, head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s election monitoring mission here, noted that stakes were higher this time because Brussels and Washington were watching closely. “Albania needs to prove it has embraced Western democratic standards,” she said. “If it doesn’t go well, it will make things very difficult.”
Albanians could be in for a tumultuous ride. Even before Ambassador Glover arrived, the election commission chief, who is appointed by Prime Minister Sali Berisha, tried unsuccessfully to block her appointment. Mr. Berisha, aides say, is still smarting from her conclusion in the 1996 elections, when she was a monitor, that his Democratic Party had engaged in fraud.
Campaigning has already taken a bloody turn. Last week, a regional leader for a small conservative party was killed in a car blast that members of his party labeled a bomb attack. A week earlier, a young supporter of Mr. Berisha was fatally shot after an argument over a campaign poster. In May, an opposition lawmaker was killed.
Even if the election itself is peaceful, some Western diplomats say they are alarmed that hundreds of thousands of rural voters do not yet have the necessary identification documents for voting. Albanians are also voting for the first time under a new proportional representation system, prompting concerns that a messy coalition-forming process could plunge the country further into murk.
With little to distinguish the policies of left and right, the election has come down to a gladiatorial, personality-driven contest between two men. Slightly ahead in polls is the incumbent Mr. Berisha, a heart surgeon and rightist reformer whose government has been dogged by corruption charges and who is campaigning on his success at linking Albania to NATO and thus restoring stature in the world.
His challenger is Edi Rama, the mercurial, Socialist mayor of Tirana for the past eight years, a former artist who has splashed lurid bright paint on the city’s once dilapidated buildings, removed ninety tons of garbage and invested in education and health care. His authoritarian streak has caused some critics to mock him as “Tirana.”
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