Open the Code!

By Arian Galdini

In a democracy, the new does not register at the counter of the old.

It is born, tested, heard, challenged, defeated or raised before the citizen.

That is why the Electoral Code is not mere seat mechanics.

It is one of the deepest acts of a Republic, the place where the state shows whether it sees the citizen as a source of political life, or as a person who must choose only among those whom the apparatus has allowed to survive.

The numbers come later.

First comes the question, does a new idea have the right to take public form without begging permission from an order that has learned how to survive?

Political rights are not only the right to vote.

They are also the right of a conviction, a community, an effort, a voice not yet tested by power, to stand before the public without being treated as a danger before it is heard.

A citizen is not fully sovereign if he is given only the final moment of choice, while the road on which representation is born has already been controlled by money, the screen, the administration, dependence, inherited fame, and the small daily fear.

The ballot is not free merely because it is cast without violence.

It is free when, before it, the citizen has seen enough political life not to choose within a map narrowed by others.

This is the right of political birth.

Without it, democracy remains a counting of the system’s survivors.

A just Code does not ask only how seats are divided.

It asks how a possibility is born.

It asks whether the law helps society regenerate, or forces it to recycle the same actors with new names, new colors, temporary agreements, and temporary hostilities.

It asks whether the citizen can see another form of representation before judging it, or whether every new effort must first pass through a test built by those who do not want it born.

When electoral law does not protect this right, it is no longer merely unjust.

It becomes an instrument of political sterilization.

The word is heavy, but there is no softer word for a mechanism that does not stop you from speaking, but makes you unheard, that does not stop you from existing, but asks you to be large before allowing you to grow, that does not stop you from entering the race, but organizes the race so that your birth appears unnecessary, premature, unwanted.

Democracy is not killed only with a fist.

Albania has seen naked violence.

May 28, 1996, is not the moral property of any side.

It is a wound of the Republic.

That day must not be used to give one side permanent virtue and the other permanent guilt.

It must be used as a moral prohibition against every power that cannot bear opposition.

But a country has learned nothing from yesterday’s violence if it has merely replaced the heavy hand with the soft instrument.

Open violence and refined control are not the same thing, but they may come from the same instinct, the fear that the citizen may produce something power has not foreseen.

The wound of 1996 cannot become a shield for today’s control.

You cannot say you condemn violence against the opposition and, at the same time, build rules that make the birth of a new opposition harder.

You cannot speak of democratic memory and use that memory to preserve an order in which the new must receive certification from consolidated forces.

Memory that does not become standard turns into decoration.

And moral decorations are among the most dangerous weapons of powers that want to appear repentant without changing their instinct.

The Socialist Party and the Democratic Party do not own the Republic.

They may have history, votes, wounds, structures, merits, faults, and real weight in public life.

But they have no right to write political life as two heirs to a shared estate.

The state is not an album of two political families.

Parliament is not a room where the future may enter only if it does not disturb the comfort of those who have long been there.

Large parties may win.

They may lose.

They may carry their weight.

But they cannot be the office that issues the birth permit for every other alternative.

If a new force must become visible before it is allowed to be seen, the law is not measuring maturity.

It is demanding a miracle.

If an untested idea must prove that it has mass before it is given the chance to reach people, then the system is not testing it.

It is weakening it.

If the citizen is shown only those who have already passed through the old filters of money, the screen, the administration, and habit, then his choice has been impoverished before it becomes an act.

This is not only an injustice against one party.

It is a diminishment of the citizen.

Such a Code teaches the person not to try.

It teaches the young that politics is not born from conviction, but from permission.

It teaches society that representation is a privilege of those who have survived inside apparatuses, and not a right of those who want to build new public meaning.

A country that teaches this lesson for many years does not lose only the quality of elections.

It loses the citizen’s courage to create.

An unjust Code does not kill only seats.

It kills courage before courage becomes organization.

That is why the debate over percentages, lists, coalitions, and formulas cannot be held over a moral void.

A number is never entirely innocent when it is placed upon an unequal reality.

A condition that looks the same for everyone may have a completely different effect on those who enter with accumulated power and those who enter only with citizens, words, work, and trust.

An equal rule over unequal lives may become injustice with an orderly face.

This must also be said to Western partners with dignity, not with pleading.

Electoral reform must not be measured only by the ability of the large parties to reach agreement.

In a country where power and the historical opposition have grown used to treating public life as their own space, agreement among the large is not always proof of maturity.

Sometimes it is the quietest way to close what should have been opened.

A legal text may have a European appearance and an old effect of control.

It may look clean in procedure and be unjust in consequence.

The standard must be different.

Does the Code allow political birth?

Does it allow the citizen to see more than those whom the system has preserved for him?

Does it accept society as the source of representation, or does it force society to recycle only those forms that do not disturb the existing order?

Does it protect democracy from fragmentation, or does it use the fear of fragmentation to protect the oligopoly?

These questions are not technical.

They are questions about the dignity of the Republic.

National Renewal, in its deepest meaning, is not a demand for another chair in an old order.

It is the moment when a people no longer accepts merely changing the faces of power, but asks for another relationship between the human being, the state, and truth.

It begins when the citizen refuses to be the ceremonial audience of a Republic that speaks in his name but leaves him outside the decision.

It begins when Albanian identity does not remain a memory that warms the heart, but becomes responsibility for a state where the human being can be born politically without asking permission from the old apparatuses.

National Renewal does not ask for privilege.

It asks that the Republic have no owners.

It asks that the law not become the guardian of the old apparatus and the obstacle to new political birth.

It asks that a citizen not be treated as mature only on the day he votes, but as a mature source of public life from the moment he seeks to build representation.

It asks that the state not fear political birth, because a state that fears the birth of the new is, in truth, afraid of its own people.

This is why the Electoral Code is not committee business.

It is a question of political civilization.

A Code that treats the new as a disturbance to the old does not reform.

It restores.

A law that asks political birth to prove its size before it is allowed to breathe does not protect democracy.

It protects the fear of the apparatuses.

A rule that gives the citizen only those alternatives the system has left alive does not respect the sovereign.

It calls him at the end, after impoverishing the beginning.

Albania does not need a Code that counts votes only after the new has been weakened, filtered, diminished, or pushed outside visibility.

It needs a Code that protects the moment before the count, the moment when an idea becomes a voice, when a voice becomes a community, when a community becomes a possibility, when the citizen sees that possibility and decides for himself whether to accept it or reject it.

That is where the Republic begins.

Not in the final arithmetic.

In the first right to be born politically.

This time, the test is not who remembers May 26 or May 28, 1996, more beautifully.

The test is who has the courage not to repeat by law what was once done by violence.

If Albania wants Europe, it must prove it in the place where democracy begins before the counting, in the right of a citizen to create representation without asking permission from the apparatus that has learned how to survive.

A Code that protects this right opens the Republic.

A Code that suffocates it does not reform elections.

It administers old ownership in new language.

Arian Galdini