With almost all votes counted, Albania’s Socialist opposition was on course for a landslide victory yesterday in a parliamentary election, but there was still no word from defeated Prime Minister Sali Berisha.
Berisha, the country’s dominant political figure since the end of Stalinist rule in 1991, has not been seen or heard in public since Sunday, when Albanians voted to deny him a third consecutive term as premier.
With votes counted from 86 per cent of polling stations in the impoverished Nato country, a Socialist-led alliance headed by former Tirana mayor Edi Rama was on track to take 84 of Parliament’s 140 seats. Berisha’s Democrats were on 56.
The West is anxious to see a smooth handover of power in a country that is deeply polarised between the Socialists and Democrats and no stranger to political violence. A peaceful transition would help revive Albania’s stalled bid to join the European Union, which has yet to accept Tirana’s application to join due to misgivings over its democratic maturity and deep-rooted corruption.
“We continue to wait quietly, respecting our democratic and European ethics, for our opponent to accept his loss and accept and join Albania’s great victory,” said Rama, a 48-year-old artist who, as mayor, won international acclaim for revitalising Albania’s drab capital with splashes of paint and avenues of trees. The Socialists disputed Berisha’s last election win in 2009, and called supporters into the streets. Four were eventually shot dead by security forces.
Berisha was credited with taking Albania into Nato in 2009 and onto the first rung of EU membership, but his opponents accuse him of undermining democracy and allowing graft and organised crime to flourish.