Prime Minister Edi Rama was caught today on the streets of Rome talking loudly on the phone, demanding accountability from the "co-chair of a committee", which in all likelihood refers to one of the two major parliamentary committees: the Electoral Reform Committee or the Territorial Reform Committee.
Sources close to the majority say that Rama's nervousness is related to the fact that SP MPs, Damian Gjiknuri or Arbjan Mazniku, have not yet officially started work on the committees where they co-chair with Oerd Bylykbashi and Luciano Boçi from the opposition.
The first meetings of the joint committees were scheduled to take place yesterday, but were postponed at the last minute—a development that seems to have raised concerns in the pink headquarters. Not about the product of these tables, which has historically been poor and unconsulted, but about the message that this deadlock sends to Brussels, which requires formal cooperation between the majority and the opposition on key reforms.
Ironically, the last time the SP and the DP sat down at a joint table, the result was the unilateral change of the closing of the lists of deputies on behalf of Rama and Berisha just a few months before the parliamentary elections on May 11—a process that was criticized by the public and is considered one of the most serious deviations from democratic standards.
However, it seems that this time Rama's concern is more political than technical: in the eyes of the EU, any delay by the commissions translates as a lack of will for reform, at a moment when the government needs to show that the country is moving at pace towards integration.
