Third Monitoring Report on the Quality of the Debate in the Parliament

This report covers the monitoring period 1 -31 October 2014 and it includes 11 parliamentary sessions. The main conclusions in this Third report are that the discussion about the legislation remains weak, but the MPs had little more interaction compared to the previous monitoring periods 19 June – 31 July and 25 August – 30 September.

The increased participation of women MPs is credited for most of the replies and counter-replies and, as a result, for the deepening of discussion on legislative proposals. The increased interaction is reflected in the growing number of replies and counter-replies on part of the legislative proposals. That allowed the public to get views from different angles on several topics.

The topics that attracted most attention of MPs and were most discussed in October were the Amended draft Budget for 2015, the session for parliamentary questions (first in this composition of the Assembly), the European Commission Progress Reports for 2014, amendments to Energy Law and amendments to Law for technological and industrial zones. Most of other topics in the parliamentary agenda passed with small and one-sided or without any discussion. Therefore, the public was deprived once again of a quality debate on large part of the legislations. At the same time, the opportunity to test the validity and the strength of the arguments through debate was missed. That does not allow the arguments to be opposed or supplemented in favor of creating better public policies for the common good and public interest.

Characteristic of this monitoring period is that the MPs from the main opposition block lead by SDSM continue with the boycott of the Assembly. Besides, for the period 1-20 October 2014 the work of the Assembly was boycotted by the opposition MPs from the Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA). On 20 October, MPs from DPA resumed their parliamentary work and activities. Generally, in October, MPs remained in their “trenches”. Most of the individual MP discussions did not refer to other speeches and did not manage to persuade any other MPs to change their position and standpoints. With this, MPs in general also did not display readiness to amend their positions under the force of better arguments brought in the discussions by other speakers.