A Country That Can Only Say No : Albania decides to stay firmly rooted in the past

The freest election in its history has left Albania’s government firmly in Communist hands, embittering its nascent democratic forces and leaving it facing an unrelievedly somber future.

Last Sunday’s voting exposed the intense polarization affecting Europe’s most backward state. The Communists, now calling themselves the Party of Labor, swept the rural areas while suffering humiliating defeats in Tirana and other cities. But victory in the countryside, home to two-thirds of Albania’s 3.3 million people, was enough. Two-thirds of the legislative seats were won by Communists.

Supporters of the new Democratic Party reacted angrily. Their day-after protest in the northern town of Shkoder ended with the police shooting into a crowd, killing three and wounding scores. That was ample evidence that while Albania may have become a multi-party state, its official mentality remains determinedly one-party and authoritarian. The defeated opposition is feeling more than just electoral disappointment. Younger and urban Albanians had anticipated a burst of reforms that would propel their long isolated and economically ravaged country into the European mainstream. But older and rural Albanians, whether out of instinctive conservatism or ignorance about the availability of a real electoral choice, stuck with their longtime Communist masters. The result couldn’t be worse. Albania’s chance to emerge from stagnation has been put on indefinite hold, while its internal divisions have deepened.

The Communist leadership, while interested in getting help from Europe, is in no hurry to move toward a market economy. Absent that, potential investors and donors of developmental aid can be expected to keep their checkbooks in their pockets. Albania’s bankrupt industries and antique agriculture thus seem destined to slide further into decrepitude and its people into deeper misery.

What can be done to relieve that misery, which in the last year has made economic refugees of at least 40,000 Albanians? Certainly humanitarian aid--food and medical relief especially--can and should be urgently provided. A U.S. mission is due in Tirana today to assess what assistance is feasible. But stopgap help won’t clean up the systemic mess that 45 years of Stalinist rule produced. Only Albanians can act to resolve those problems. Their unhappy choice last Sunday was not to do so.