Eurasia Press & News
The Albanian government has decided to further lower the cost of ID cards for different groups of the population, Minister of Interior Affairs Bujar Nishani said on Sunday.
“The price for pensioners will drop from 500 lek to 300 lek (from €4.20 to €2.50), while for students the price will decrease to 200 lek (€1.65),” the minister announced. The normal price is 1,200 lek, (€10). The decision may cost the government up to 500 million lek (€3.84 million).
The left wing opposition asked the government to offer free ID cards to the poorest. “The whole process is going in [the] wrong direction. The government is using peoples’ inability to pay for new ID cards to manipulate the next general election”, Edi Rama, head of the Socialist party, said. The opposition hailed the new decision from the government; Erjon Veliaj, head of G-99, commented that “opposition pressure worked, in this case”.
ID cards will be used for voting in the next parliamentary elections, scheduled for 28 June. There are some 700,000 Albanians that have neither a valid passport nor ID card, thus risking loss of the right to vote in the elections.
Nishani said that 130,000 people that do not have a valid passport have already requested ID cards. The government proposed a new advertising campaign to convince people to apply for the new cards. They also requested the opposition to co-operate as well, to convince peoples to obtain the new IDs.
ID cards were last issued in Albania during the final days of the communist regime. In 2002, Albania approved a new law, making the ID card obligatory for all citizens, given the impossibility of guaranteeing fair elections in the absence of reliable voter identification documents.
