Preliminary results from Sunday s parliamentary election in Albania suggest the ruling Socialist Party (PS) will retain its parliamentary majority.
The PS was credited with 48.6 per cent of the vote at 11.45 am CET on Tuesday morning, with fewer than 400 of the country s 5,199 polling stations yet to report. The opposition Democratic Party (PD) had meanwhile secured 39.4 per cent of ballots.
If confirmed, the results would give the PS 73 of parliament s 140 seats, according to Europe Elects.
Incumbent Prime Minister Edi Rama has invited supporters to join him and his PS lawmakers to embrace victory at a gathering in the capital on Tuesday afternoon.
It is fair to say that there is little love lost between Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and his main opponent in this Sunday’s election, Lulzim Basha.
Basha has long called for Rama to resign over corruption claims while his MPs even withdrew from parliament in 2019 over allegations of vote-rigging. Meanwhile, opposition demonstrations got so out of control that at one point protesters tried to break into Rama’s office.
Polls see the two men neck-and-neck ahead of the election on Sunday, although Rama is confident that his Socialist Party will secure a landslide win. That would see Rama, a former painter and basketball player, serve an unprecedented third term as leader of Albania.
On a visit to Albania in March, Kosovo’s new prime minister, Albin Kurti, called on Albanians to vote for change as Kosovars did on February 14: “Albanians deserve better,” he said.
Kurti, an ethnic-Albanian along with around 90% of Kosovo’s 1.8 million population, urged voters to elect the members of his leftist-nationalist Vetevendosje movement who are running for seats in the Albanian parliament on April 25 on an anti-corruption mandate.
It was anti-corruption and opposition to entrenched political elites that led to Vetevendosje’s landslide election on February 14. Kurti now serves as prime minister while his ally, Vjosa Osmani, was sworn in as president on April 4. Vetevendosje has 58 seats in Kosovo’s 120-seat parliament, a working majority with the support of 10 non-Serb minority politicians.