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

The monitoring period of this report is 25 August-30 September. It includes 21 parliamentary sessions. The main conclusions are that the discussion about the legislation remains weak, but the MPs had little more interaction compared to the first monitoring period 19 June – 31 July.

The increased interaction is reflected trough the increased number of replies and counter replies on part of the legislative proposals. This allowed the public to get views from different angles on several topics of parliamentary discussions. However, most of the topics from the parliamentary agenda passed with little and one-sided discussion or without any debate. Therefore, the public was deprived of a quality debate on large part of the discussions. 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 the monitoring period is that the MPs from the main opposition block lead by SDSM, are boycotting the work of the Parliament. Also, the work of the Assembly in this period was boycotted by the opposition MPs from the Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA).
Generally, the MPs remained in their “trenches”. Most of the individual MP discussions did not refer to other speeches and did not manage to persuade other MPs to change their position and standpoints. With this, the MPs in general did not display readiness to amend their positions under the force of better arguments brought in the discussions by other speakers.

At the beginning of the period covered with this report (26 August) at the session of the parliamentary Committee for financing and budget a violent incident broke out between MPs from the DPA and the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI). This happened during the debate for the state budget reallocation. During this session, forms of offensive and inappropriate speech with personal attacks were noted but also complete ignoring of presented arguments and outvoting without argumentation that culminated with a violent incident. This report presents this event in a separate section.