The law clearly explains: a candidacy for the People's Advocate is submitted in writing by no less than 28 deputies. The moment the candidacy is submitted with those signatures and the deadline closes, the act is completed.

There is no provision that allows for the retroactive withdrawal of signatures, just as there is no norm that allows for the undoing of the fact that an MP has publicly sponsored candidates. What we are seeing today is a desperate attempt to do politics with legal instruments: to claim that with a belated statement one can erase signatures, to hide the lack of coherence and to save the face of a party that, instead of openly calculating its election, is trying to undo its own tracks. Did the opposition colleagues have any pressure from the SP when they threw signatures for the candidates???

It seems tragicomic that the opposition, which has submitted signatures in support of Endri Shabani's candidacy, is asking us to account for why his name was included with the names of the other 5 candidates in the session. Meanwhile, in an interview for Syri TV, I saw the opposition MP saying that the order for the signatures was given by the Secretary General of the Democratic Party, Mr. Noka, but he refused to give the name of the DP MP who lobbied for Mr. Shabani. And are we to blame for this again?

The truth is that the withdrawal of signatures, at this stage, is a political act without any legal effect. The signatures existed at the time of filing, were used to qualify the candidacies, and the Laws Commission acted on them. What can change today is only the vote and the political stance, not the official history of the process.

Moreover, in this specific case, it is said that the document of one of the political candidates, issued by a party apparatus, has only 27 signatures, thus not even reaching the formal minimum that the law itself requires. Here we are not dealing with torture of interpretation, but with an elementary inability to respect a number: 28.

Therefore, the fundamental question is not “does the law allow us to withdraw signatures?” The question is: how is it possible that a party that claims to represent the opposition people has fallen into such a state that it is unable to produce a single, clean, independent name, above the parties, and stand behind it? How is it possible that, after distributing signatures without criteria, the same party tries to take them back with a statement, as if the deputy's signature were a fiscal coupon and not an instrument of sovereignty that this hall represents?

This is where what the DP MP, Saimir Korreshi, said in the interview becomes significant. He himself essentially admits that the process of signatures for the candidacies of the People's Advocate was done without seriousness and without a political and professional filter, while trying to relativize it as something "normal" in the conditions of the fragmented opposition. Korreshi admits that the signatures were cast "very lightly", "for friendship" or "for political sport", which shows a lack of institutional seriousness in a constitutional process such as the election of the People's Advocate.

Even more problematic is the idea he tries to sell as an excuse: that “signing does not necessarily mean support”. This is in itself an admission that the deputies have abused a formal instrument, turning it into a fictitious procedure. By this logic, a deputy’s signature for a constitutional institution is no more valuable than a Facebook status: he posts it today, deletes it tomorrow, as if he is making a joke and not a law.

If there is a message that should come out of this debate, it is simple: The Constitution and the law are not decorations, but guardians of the independence of this institution. And whoever today tries to play with signatures, with criteria, with the perception of independence, is in fact signing something much more serious than a candidacy form: they are signing their own political crisis, the inability to unify around a single serious candidate, and the willingness to reduce the opposition to an instrument of petty tactics, which can neither keep its word, nor its signature, nor the minimum respect for the institutions it claims to protect.