The head of OSCE Presence in Tirana, Ambassador Bernd Borchardt, in an interview for Vizion Plus said the electoral reform process has been dragged out for a considerable amount of time without coming to any concrete result.

Ambassador Borchardt said that five months from the general elections, the electoral reform has not made any fundamental progress. According to him, there is little time left, not to say no time, to conduct a meaningful and detailed election reform, which should be in line with the recommendations of OSCE/ODIHR, OSCE’s commitments and international standards. In his view, last- minute changes to the legislation risk undermining the public confidence in the process; this means that either the electors or CEC will have less time available to get familiar with the amended law.

However, he expressed confidence that regardless of the short time available, the Ad-Hoc Commission can successfully deal with four fields: increasing transparency and shedding light on the campaign funding, tightening legal sanctions in the event of failure to meet the gender criteria in the lists of candidates, tightening of legal measures against the breach of law, the fourth point remains the need to improve the provisions on media coverage of election campaigns.

He appealed to the Ad Hoc parliamentary commission to put all the efforts into this reform and push ahead with its agenda in order to refer the necessary amendments to Parliament any time soon. He underlined that the parties need to put aside their political interests, focus on what really matters and make a success of this reform