FeaturesAlbania’s upcoming parliamentary elections in Spring 2025 will allow expatriates to vote for the first time, following recent amendments to the Electoral Code, though as Bekim Bruka argues significant logistical and administrative challenges could hinder their participation and raise concerns about fair representation and potential electoral abuse.
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.
Aside from the tremendous political implications and heightened focus surrounding these questions, the recent law exposes several issues that will make it difficult and inaccessible for expatriates to vote. If not addressed, they could backfire by potentially keeping Albania indeterminately trapped in its prolonged phase of being a democracy in transition.
Here we discuss two key areas: the inherent issues and potential challenges within the current version of the diaspora vote and insights on Albania’s harsh transition since the 1990s, with a particular focus on elections and how seemingly bipartisan legislative initiatives have not always served the common good. While the analysis touches on political and historical narratives, its foundation is largely rooted in a legal examination, given that the laws passed by the Parliament or exported from Western examples have consistently shaped the framework of Albania’s electoral system and complicated its democratization processes.
The Struggle for Genuine Representation: Issues with Diaspora Voting
Albania’s Central Election Commission recently warned the Parliament that there is a risk that the diaspora vote will not take place due to insufficient time for mail-in ballots to be processed. The commission emphasized that it would be impossible for the ballots to be sent and received within the 30 to 45-day window prescribed by the new law, seriously threatening the successful inclusion of the diaspora vote next year.
Comparatively, the practices of other countries offer a well-developed example for facilitating votes from abroad. In the Greek model for European Parliament elections, for example, electoral authorities allow different methods for diaspora voting. These include specific polling stations established in suitable locations and postal services that offer an extended deadline with no charge for delivery, allowing for the smooth processing of ballots and a chance for expatriates to vote in national elections without undue time pressure. A similar approach could be vital in preventing system failure and the exclusion of thousands of voters, but it seems unlikely given the Albanian Parliament’s history of postponements—which whether intentional or not—have repeatedly delayed diaspora voting rights.
A second issue arises from the fact that, unlike residents of Albania, citizens living abroad are not automatically registered voters. Instead, they must manually register for each parliamentary election cycle, while their votes are to be counted in the county of their last residence in Albania. This creates an additional administrative burden, requiring voters to stay vigilant about registration deadlines and procedures each election cycle, potentially resulting in reduced voter participation due to the added complexity that costs time and resources.
Similarly, the requirement for expatriates to independently manage the mailing of their ballots adds further complexity to the voting process—a measure that effectively shifts all logistical responsibilities to individual voters, creating additional obstacles that may undermine the accessibility and fairness of the electoral process.
And while many voters might be prevented from casting their ballots, the potential for abuse in the process runs high if the two main parties, primarily the ruling Socialists, decide to use their influence to facilitate postal services only for their supporters, paying for or expediting the mailing process in key areas where their voters are concentrated. This would not be surprising given Albania’s history of electoral abuses, such as the “patronazhistët” scandal on the eve of the 2021 Parliamentary elections where the personal data and voting preferences of nearly one million Tirana voters were allegedly tracked and used to pressure voters into supporting the ruling party. Indeed, initiatives that provide preferential treatment for certain voting blocs while institutionally blocking it for others can be seen as a form of vote buying, which, adapted to the diaspora context, is driven primarily by electoral calculations rather than a genuine effort to improve access.
Thirdly, the issue of expired ID cards poses a significant threat to the success of the diaspora vote. A situation similar to the one in the Albanian town of Himara during August’s partial local elections, where thousands of voters were denied their right to vote due to expired identification cards, could easily unfold on a larger scale. While the law requires voters abroad to obtain a Personal Identification Number (NID), this can only be issued if the voter presents a valid ID or passport. In Himara, many voters arrived with expired ID cards, assuming, as in previous elections, that they would still be permitted to vote. Although logically, a person’s identity and citizenship remain valid even with an expired document, this technicality barred many from participating in the electoral process.
Taken together, these factors highlight a broader issue: the lack of public awareness surrounding the diaspora voting process, which presents a significant risk of producing a skewed process. In a political environment where propaganda and extensive admixture between public administration with party resources play a central role in electoral processes, it is important to consider how they can badly deform the Albanian reality. The absence of reliable institutional information puts diaspora voters at risk of becoming mere extensions of political party structures, making it easier for parties to use such a vacuum in creating “patronazhist” structures abroad, including through the usage of diplomatic or consular missions, transforming what seemed to be a hope for democracy into an imminent danger to it.
Democracy in Flux: Albania’s Electoral Evolution
Albania’s path to democracy has been impeded by an inclining rocky road, shaped by the cumulative weight of its political, economic, and social past. The country formally transitioned to a parliamentary democracy following the 1991 student protests, and after some highly contested elections in the same year, Albania elected a party other than the communists for the first time in four decades. Since then, Albania’s attempts to strengthen the rule of law and democratic governance while implementing economic reforms have been largely marked by uncertainty, rendering the country’s transition both protracted and turbulent.
A major role in creating this chaos has been played by Albania’s international partners—particularly those in Western Europe—alongside the country’s opportunistic and democratically untrained post-1990 politicians. When Albania shifted to party pluralism, the West was largely seen as “a gift from above” and their representatives as authoritative figures who were to be heard unconditionally. For their part, western advisors, experts, diplomats and activists poured into Albania in a similar fashion that Yugoslavs, Soviets and the Chinese had done during the communist regime: a group of missionaries who, under the guise of modernization, thought of discovering an isolated and backward society that, through a combination of technological, economic, and political reforms exported from abroad, could be brought to the larger European family in no time.
The truth is that while the EU’s intentions towards Albania were not ill-intended, they constituted a practically naïve approach, with the Europeans continuously leaving unnoticed the situation on the ground in the name of consolidating democracy.
First, the EU largely overlooked the fact that Albanians were encountering democracy for the first time in their history. The country’s socio-political and economic foundations were not conducive to establishing a democratic order, as the country’s development since gaining independence was obstructed by several foreign occupations, uncertainty about the fate of the Albanians in the Former Yugoslavia, persistent economic underdevelopment, and despotically behaving governments. Unlike many countries in Western Europe which had well-established traditions of democracy-building, Albania’s post-1990 political elites had kept ingrained communist habits and displayed only a limited understanding of democracy. Under such circumstances, copy-pasting laws and norms from Western democracies without a deep understanding of the conditions of its society and politics at large became quite impractical.
Secondly, Albania was severely impaired when it came to the existence of a pre-democratic civil society. While other communist countries in East-Central Europe went through some stages of allowing dissent and facilitating limited political reforms, Albania remained loyal to the Stalinist path of self-isolation and allowed no room for any sort of activity outside party control. The emergence of a Prague Spring and subsequently a Vaćlav Havel in the Albanian context was not possible under such circumstances, leaving a legacy of conformism in the post-1990 years and seriously complicating the development of an organic civil society.
A significant focus of the international support for Albania’s democratization has involved recommendations for an electoral system designed to strengthen institutions and promote fairer elections, that is, the way in which votes are translated into parliamentary seats. Until 2008, with some exceptions, Albania generally employed a mixed system: 100 members were elected directly via single-member constituencies and 40 were elected from national multi-name lists from parties or party coalitions. The OSCE had urged Albania in 2005 to reform its electoral system, part of a larger effort to make post-communist East-Central European countries move away from mixed systems.
One particular problem that the OSCE noticed with the previous mixed-member system was that it did not ensure the proportionality enshrined in the Constitution. Parties could distort the allocation of the 40 supplementary seats in their favor by encouraging their voters to cast their proportional vote for the other coalition parties in order to maximize the shared number of seats. The outcome was a Parliament that did not reflect the popular will.
Through the 2008 constitutional amendments, however, Albania shifted to proportional representation with an added element of regionalism: the country was divided into 12 constituencies which had to coincide with one of the country’s levels of government: the counties (Alb: qarqe, qark), which separately elected Members of Parliament via multi-member lists.
The result of an agreement between the two ruling parties, the Democrats and the Socialists, the reform was highly contested by smaller parties who contended that the amendment raised exclusive barriers to entering the Parliament. Such discrimination against small parties has been usually justified as a means of preventing excessive fragmentation, making it easier to form a government for weakly structured party systems of East-Central Europe.
The problem with Albania is, however, the unholy strengthening of the two main parties, turning the country’s electoral landscape into a party duopoly. Indeed, the 2008 reform, with both its amended versions of 2019 and 2024, was just a way for the two major parties to assert control over elections, and by extension, Albania’s democracy. The reform essentially marginalized and eliminated most of the small parties through a system that ensured proportionality only for the big parties.
The first barrier to achieving such a duopoly was the creation of separate constituencies that would elect their MPs proportionally. Each constituency would have an allocation of seats based on their population: Tirana County is the largest with 36 seats allocated today, whereas Kukës is the smallest with 3 seats allocated, with the threshold for the election of an MP varying from one county to another. Calculation-wise, votes that would otherwise enable smaller parties to secure parliamentary seats in a purely proportional model are instead divided into smaller portions within each county. In counties with smaller populations, this drastically lowers the likelihood of gaining a seat, and consequently, parties may be denied parliamentary representation even with a substantial vote share.
There is a strong correlation between Albania’s electoral system and the number of parties represented in parliament. From 1997 to 2009, for example, the range of parliamentary parties remained steady. However, since 2009, the main parties have consolidated their share of parliamentary seats, the number of smaller parties has declined, and newer parties struggle to gain traction despite initial momentum. A wave of emerging parties in the past as well as previously established parties either never achieved parliamentary representation or gradually became inactive. Ironically, the so-called proportional system has produced somewhat disproportionate outcomes.
Contrary to expectations, Albania’s proportional system has not only engendered two-party dominance, making the country less democratic in the electoral landscape, but it has also changed party structures. Internally, parties have become more centralized around a single leader, often disregarding internal rules, lacking transparency in candidate selection, and providing little room for accountability. The Democratic Party’s move, under its current leader, to introduce primaries for the 2023 local elections appears less a genuine effort toward democratization than a strategic attempt to present a facade of modernization. While Albanian Democrats frequently cite US primaries as a model, the Albanian party framework—unlike the codified state-by-state system in the US—remains marred by loopholes, incomplete statutes, clientelism, and limited channels for debate, all of which stifle meaningful internal consultation.
The key factor reinforcing the internal insularity of Albanian parties, often called their “bunkerization,” has been the closed-list element of proportional representation. Unlike an open-list system, where voters can choose individual candidates, this reform requires them to vote exclusively for parties, effectively “depersonalizing” the voting process. With some minor exceptions, votes now display only the party name, not individual candidates, making candidate selection entirely dependent on party leadership, and by extension, candidates’ political positioning themselves.
Thus, while proportional representation has been more associated with consolidating democracy than other electoral systems, sometimes shifts from mixed systems to proportional representation do not always occur in democratic contexts, as the example of Albania shows.
Indeed, what developed in Albania and much of East-Central Europe was a type of proto-democracies—political systems that meet certain procedural democratic standards but remain only partially developed as substantive democracies. Over time, these proto-democracies have frequently transformed into “stabilocracies,” where leaders are perceived by the EU as sources of maintaining stability but at the expense of democratic integrity. The notion of an Eastern democracy matching Western ideals has, especially for Albania, proven to be elusive.
In this context, the diaspora vote could either deepen existing limitations or pave the way for meaningful reform. If introduced without sufficient channels for open discourse and independent expression, as recent signs suggest, the diaspora vote risks entrenching the status quo, extending autocratic influence over Albanian voices abroad. Rather than allowing for fresh insights from those outside the nation’s concentrated political structures, the diaspora vote may instead become a tool for bolstering current power hierarchies.
