Albania's Rama wins historic fourth term, opposition say vote stolen

Albania's prime minister Edi Rama has secured an unprecedented fourth term in power after his Socialist Party sailed to victory in Sunday's election, official results showed on Tuesday, although the opposition claim the vote was stolen.

With 96 per cent of ballots counted, the Socialist Party (PS) had 52 per cent of the votes, ahead of the second-placed Democratic Party (PD) on 34 per cent, figures from the election commission showed. As it stands, PS wins 82 seats in the 140-seat parliament while PD gets 52.

If confirmed, the result would extend PS's four-seat majority and give Rama a comfortable margin to form a government.

It would also enable him to continue working to honour his pledge to bring Albania into the European Union by 2030, although many experts say that timeline is optimistic given the reforms required, especially in eradicating corruption.

Doubts clouded the results, however. International observers questioned the fairness of the poll and Albania's special prosecutor said it was investigating 39 cases related to the election, mostly for vote buying. It did not say which parties were under suspicion.

PD's firebrand leader, former president and prime minister Sali Berisha, dismissed the results and called for a protest on May 16, the day leaders from across Europe are scheduled to gather in the capital Tirana for a summit.

"We will never accept these elections - never," Berisha told a press conference on Tuesday in which he alleged wrongdoing without publicly providing evidence.

Berisha continued the acrimonious language of the campaign trail, calling Rama a "narco-dictator". In a statement to Reuters, Rama's PS denied election fraud and called Berisha, 80, "an old hopeless former communist politician" - a particular slight in a country that was locked away from the world for 50 years under hard-fisted communist rule until 1990.

Rama, in power since 2013, had been favourite to win the election, bolstered in part by an influential network built up over 12 years in power, a recent period of healthy economic growth and a fractured opposition.

Two days before the vote, he forgave all government fines from 2015 to 2024, including for traffic, construction and health and safety infractions.

The government has not put a price on the fines, but the opposition say they amount to 200 million euros.

Still, the scale of victory has surprised some analysts who had expected that corruption scandals and recent unrest would dent Rama's lead.

Instead, the resounding win may prolong a sense of predictability in Albania in contrast to other Balkan countries such as Kosovo, Serbia and Bulgaria, where ruling parties have faced political crises over the past year.

"No-one expected there to be a qualified majority for a single party. It is like (Hungary's Prime Minister) Orban in his best days," said political analyst Lutfi Dervishi.

Rama has won favour from the West by accepting migrants from Italy and housing Afghans awaiting visa processing for the United States.

But voters at home say he runs the country on a system of patronage and has done little to eradicate unemployment and graft that involves Albanian gangs laundering drug and weapons money at home.

Hundreds of thousands of Albanians have emigrated since Rama came to power, in search of better prospects abroad.

An international election monitoring mission led by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe said there had been a "misuse of public resources and institutional power by the ruling party" in the campaign.

It said there were "numerous reports of pressure on public employees and other voters as well as cases of intimidation."