TIRANA, Albania — With parliamentary elections approaching on Sunday, many Albanians are feeling like Hysen Demiraj, a driver and former political prisoner, who was born in a jail cell during this country’s brutal dictatorship and says he still feels imprisoned in a country that is unfairly isolated and ostracized.
Valdrin Xhemaj/European Pressphoto Agency
Supporters of Albanian Socialist Party hold the portrait of their candidate for prime minister, Edi Rama.
The New York Times
“We Albanians are tired of feeling cut off from the world,” Mr. Demiraj, 45, said recently after waiting for hours in a scorching sun for a German visa. “We are the forgotten part of Europe, and it doesn’t feel so good.”
The intense feeling of alienation might seem surprising given that this poor, southern Balkan country joined NATO in April — a moment of enormous symbolic and psychological resonance for a place severed from the West for over 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 cover of night, as hundreds of thousands have done since 1990.
Others are fed up with life 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 health care often depends on a bribe.
Whether the election is peaceful, free and democratic, analysts and diplomats say, will help determine the progress toward international integration.
Albania’s recent application for European Union membership is already facing 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 election goes awry.
Nearly every election here since the fall of Communism in 1991 has been hotly contested, with losers accusing winners of vote-rigging or worse.
Ambassador Audrey Glover, head of election monitoring here for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, noted that the stakes were higher this time because Europe and the United States 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 Ms. Glover arrived, the government of Prime Minister Sali Berisha protested her appointment. Mr. Berisha, aides say, is still smarting from the O.S.C.E.’s conclusion in the 1996 elections, when Ms. Glover was head of monitoring, that his Democratic Party had engaged in vote fraud.
Campaigning has 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 by a man, after an argument over a party campaign poster. In May, an opposition lawmaker was killed.
Even if the election itself is peaceful, some Western diplomats are alarmed that hundreds of thousands of rural voters do not yet have the necessary identification documents for voting, potentially disenfranchising them. With little to distinguish the policies of the left and the 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 former heart surgeon for the Politburo who has refashioned himself as a rightist reformer. His government has been dogged by corruption charges, and he is campaigning on his success at linking Albania to NATO and thus restoring its stature in the world.
His challenger is Edi Rama, the mercurial, 6-foot-6 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 90 tons of garbage from a city that was buried in trash, and invested in education and health care. His authoritarian streak has caused some critics to rename the capital, Tirana, as Tirama.
Mr. Rama’s Socialist Party has accused the prime minister of trying to cover up what it says was the government’s complicity in an explosion in March 2008 in a munitions depot in Gerdec that killed 26 people and injured 300. Mr. Berisha, in turn, has accused Mr. Rama, who has refused to resign as mayor and put his name on his party’s list, of cowardice and treachery. Mr. Rama’s aides say he will resign after the Socialists win the election.
“Edi Rama, you are going to go in the garbage,” roared Mr. Berisha at a recent rally in Divjake, a small coastal town. Earlier, he challenged the mayor to fight him like Skanderbeg, the national hero who ousted Ottoman forces for a time in the 15th century.
Altin Raxhimi, an Albanian writer, argued that the election pitted one man who had delivered international prestige against another who was delivering essentials like electricity and clean drinking water. “Rama has turned Tirana into a city that now wears lipstick; he made a once unlivable city livable,” he said. “Albania got into NATO under Berisha, but he is not liked by many Albanians because he is a populist who once brought the country to the brink of civil war.”
Indeed, many still recoil at memories of 1997 when many of Albania’s three million or so people lost their life savings in a pyramid scheme, prompting thousands to loot the country’s arms stockpile. Nearly 1,500 people were killed. Mr. Berisha, who was president at the time, was forced to resign.
“Albania has an image problem in the world and we need to have free and fair elections; otherwise it will drag down the country’s image for years to come,” said Ilir Meta, a former prime minister with the center-left Socialist Movement for Integration. “The whole world will be watching us.”
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