Albania: Authoritarianism Without Oil

President George W. Bush may have been right when he proclaimed that democracy is God's gift to man, but somebody should have warned the Albanians that batteries are not included. The Albanians, who were the last people in Eastern Europe to throw off the yoke of communism, in 1990, warmly and noisily accepted the gift of democracy when it came along. They simply cannot get it to work, however.

In 1992, upon the fall of communism, the Albanians elected the then charismatic Sali Berisha, a democrat, as their president. It did not take long for Berisha, like communist Enver Hoxha before him, to turn authoritarian. He amassed enormous political power, revived the old hate-mongering Bolshevik politics of class struggle, had independent reporters and opposition leaders arrested, fired critical voices from university teaching jobs, and used the courts to hound perceived enemies.¹ Harvard scholar Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way of Temple University compare Albania under Berisha to Haiti under Jean Bertrand Aristide, Malaysia under Mahathir Mohammad, Peru under Alberto Fujimori, Russia under Boris Yeltsin, Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic, and Ukraine under Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma.²

Winning again in 1996, despite strong international criticism for running a rigged election, a Berisha-dominated parliament reelected him as president in March 1997 in an atmosphere of emergency restrictions and fear. However, he was forced to resign a few months later when Albanians rioted after losing millions in savings to a half dozen fraudulent Ponzi investment schemes that Berisha had allowed to flourish.

In summer 1997 Albanians went to the polls for the fourth time in just six years. The Socialist Party won. Its leader, Fatos Nano, whom Berisha had put in jail in 1993 on dubious corruption charges, was released from prison and became prime minister of Albania. A year later Nano himself was forced to resign by a defiant Berisha who, in typically African or Latin American political fashion, organized a coup d'état. Berisha himself led a street mob that besieged the prime minister's office and other government buildings, took over the headquarters of national public television, and surrounded the Presidential Palace.

The coup failed. The Socialists remained in power and gradually improved both the situation at home and the image of Albania abroad.

Nano's last stint in office as prime minister of Albania (2002 to 2005) was a period of relative calm and visible achievements both domestically and internationally. But more than Nano, it was Edi Rama, the new Socialist Party mayor of Tirana, elected in 2000, who gave a facelift to his city and hope to the youth of his country. As is so typical in the Balkans, Nano, who feared that Rama would succeed him as leader of the Socialist Party and eventually become prime minister, had a keen interest in complicating Rama's work. He continues to do so even today even though he no longer holds executive power. Although Nano was not an authoritarian leader, he certainly was a Machiavellian politician. He cared more about his luxurious and hedonistic lifestyle than the workings of the government, which he runs on the basis of pragmatism, favoritism, and clientelism.

By 2005 it had become clear to many that both Berisha and Nano, who were often referred to as the "two dinosaurs" of Albanian politics, were old-style politicians and they had to go. Nano committed political suicide when he broke with fellow Socialist Party leader Ilir Meta, a former prime minister. The party's split led to the defeat of the "undefeatable" Socialists in the national election in July 2005. Berisha capitalized on the split and returned to power, this time as prime minister.

Unfortunately, with Berisha back in control, Albania today is emerging as a poorly remade copy of Albania in the early and mid-1990s. Back then, the West believed that Berisha was an indomitable anticommunist and a committed democrat. In fact, Western governments paid little attention to Albania, which was commonly regarded as insignificant to the West and somehow mysterious. Even when some attention was paid, it was vaguely assumed that...