Eurasia Press & News
In the May 11 parliamentary elections, Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama secured another decisive victory, reinforcing a dominance built over three consecutive terms. His machinery of consensus is stronger than ever, but the lines between the state and the party appear increasingly blurred
After three consecutive terms in power, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has secured his strongest electoral result yet. In Sunday’s parliamentary election, the Socialist Party (SP) secured over 52% of the vote – more than four percentage points higher than in 2021 – translating into 83 seats in the 140-member Assembly, nine more than it currently holds.
The Alliance for Great Albania, led by the Democratic Party (DP) chief and former Prime Minister Sali Berisha, won just 34% of the vote and 50 seats, nine fewer than in the previous legislature. The DP has paid a price for backing its founder Berisha, a polarizing figure currently under investigation by Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Court (SPAK), along with his son, on charges of corruption and abuse of power. His comeback, widely viewed as a bid for personal survival rather than party renewal, has deepened internal rifts and further weakened the opposition.
Three additional seats went to the Social Democratic Party (SDP), led by Tom Doshi, a controversial businessman-turned-politician with declared assets worth tens of millions of euros. Sanctioned by the U.S. State Department for “significant corruption since 2018,” Doshi has long since left Parliament, yet he continues to make headlines at the polls, delivering surprising results and remaining a loyal supporter of Rama’s ruling majority.
New political parties and a shrinking civic space
In a race shaped by an electoral system designed to favor established major parties, it was the new independent political formations that faced the steepest uphill battle. The 2008 Rama-Berisha electoral reform introduced a close-list regional system, specifically aimed at sidelining smaller parties, a move that not only reduced political competition, but also concentrated power in the hands of party leaders, weakening Parliament’s role as a check on the executive.
Against the odds, three emerging parties gained seats in Parliament, marking a modest yet meaningful shift that suggests the potential for the formation of a new, legitimate opposition.
Among the newcomers, the Initiative Albania Becomes coalition, led by the Hashtag Initiative and Albania Becomes parties – respectively center-left and center-right movements, but united by a common stance against corruption and state capture – garnered 3.8% of the national vote, earning one seat.
The radical-left Together Movement, the only party representing Albania’s working class, also makes its first entry into Parliament with 1.5% of the vote. All of them evolved out of civic activism.
Entrepreneur and center-right MP Agron Shehaj, formerly aligned with the DP, secured a strong showing with his own party, The Opportunity. Not a new entity in the same sense as those emerging from civic movements, but instead part of Albania’s mainstream political landscape, The Opportunity ran on an economy-focused platform, gathering 3.1% of the vote and winning two seats.
A notable first in this election was the introduction of remote voting for Albanians living abroad. This marked a significant step for the approximately 1.1 million eligible voters registered living outside the country, around 200,000 of whom actually participated. While new independent parties did receive increased support, voting patterns that did not differ significantly from those of voters at home, as the Albanian diaspora remains fragmented, often disengaged politically, yet still holds on to a patriotic sentiment that the ruling party has been quick to exploit.
While the emergence of new political parties formed by civil society actors is a positive development, their transformation into formal political parties has, paradoxically, further diminished civic space. This has created a vacuum, one that is now only partially filled by a few remaining movements that continue to challenge the status quo. Therefore, the SP holds an overwhelming amount of power at a time when Albania’s civil society has shrunk and become increasingly marginalized.
Understanding Albania’s crisis of participation
Voter turnout in Albania’s Sunday’s election stood at just 42%, a drop of nearly four percentage points compared to the 2021 elections, marking the lowest turnout ever recorded. However, when factoring in the 3.7 million registered voters – nearly half of whom, around 1.8 million, live abroad – the actual participation among residents climbs to roughly 80%.
Still, the broader crisis of participation domestically reflects a deeper crisis of political engagement, driven by a range of structural factors.
One of the most significant is the country’s persistent wave of emigration, which has created a growing demographic void. According to Eurostat, around 75,000 Albanians were granted first-time residence permits in EU countries in 2023 alone, one of the highest emigration rates in the past decade.
Alongside the demographic exodus, trust in the political and electoral system has steadily declined. Political debate has typically been dominated by a few long-standing figures – most notably Edi Rama and Sali Berisha – who have shaped Albanian politics since the fall of communism. During the electoral campaign, they commanded over 80% of television airtime and accounted for 60% of all news coverage, offering little room for new voices to emerge.
This continuity, along with an uneven playing field and restricted media space, has severely limited the visibility of alternative political forces, leaving many voters unaware of their platforms. In Albania, media independence continues to be undermined by dubious funding, centralized ownership, and editorial interference, leading to widespread self-censorship and a decline in independent reporting.
Limited access to balanced information and tight control over public discourse have been consistently highlighted in all monitoring reports and have become persistent features of elections, inevitably driving citizens further away from political engagement.
Albania’s slide toward one-party rule
With 83 seats in Parliament, the SP is now just one vote short of the qualified majority needed to unilaterally amend the Electoral Code, Penal Code or the Justice Reform legislation. A consolidation of power that deepens Albania’s state capture, in a country effectively close to a single-party system.
Unchecked, the Socialist Party could further restrict political competition and weaken democratic institutions – especially civil liberties like freedom of speech and media freedom – both frequent targets under Rama’s government.
In the current context, the justice system has also emerged as a vulnerable battleground.
After Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj, a close ally of Prime Minister Rama, was arrested on corruption charges, Rama launched a fierce attack on the judiciary, accusing the EU-backed Special Anti-Corruption Structure (SPAK) of human rights abuses and declaring he would no longer tolerate its actions.
Albania’s justice reform, drafted with support from international experts, brought drastic changes to the judicial system and was designed to require a qualified parliamentary majority for any amendments, ensuring cross-party agreement. SPAK, central to this reform, has brought charges against prominent figures across the political spectrum. With its expanded majority, the SP may now feel emboldened to weaken SPAK and roll back on what in Albania is generally perceived as hard-won progress.
Beyond justice, the SP already exercises near-total control over state institutions. It governs 53 out of 61 municipalities and dominates access to state resources and political processes nationwide. No party in Albania has held such dominance since the beginning of the democratic transition in 1991.
The Socialist Party’s electoral machine
A fragmented opposition alone does not explain the SP’s landslide victory in the latest election. What truly sets this moment apart is the extraordinary mobilization and internal discipline within the SP’s ranks, unmatched in the past three decades.
One revealing example of the socialist’s “electoral machine” came to light in 2021, when Albanian media leaked a database allegedly compiled by SP members and activists. The database contained personal information on 910,000 voters in the Tirana region, including employment details, voting intentions, family backgrounds, needs, and vulnerabilities.
The leak exposed the depth of the party’s surveillance and the sophisticated tools used to monitor and influence the electorate. Far from denying the existence of this system, SP officials publicly acknowledged, and even praised it, as a sign of organizational strength.
Operating in an increasingly authoritarian political climate, SP operatives have come to function more like disciplined enforcers than party members. Their influence extends beyond political campaigning to exerting pressure on public institutions, administrative bodies, polling stations, and ordinary citizens.
This system of control has proven highly effective and rewarding for the party, delivering its best electoral result. But its success comes at a cost. By tightening its grip on state machinery and blurring the line between party and public administration, the SP reinforces the perception that elections are no longer a meaningful instrument for change.
Up until 2012, Albania could still pretend to play the game of political alternation. But the latest election risks confirming the sense that the ballot box has become little more than a ceremonial formality, meant to ratify what’s already in place rather than challenging it. Along with it, public disillusionment with democracy grows ever harder to ignore.
A country without an opposition, rewarded by stabilitocracy
During the campaign, Pandeli Majko, a veteran of socialist politics, captured the political mood with a telling remark : after the elections, Albania’s real opposition would be the European Union (EU), not the DP. His words lay bare how the SP has capitalized on Brussels’ stabilitocratic approach, where stability is prized over democracy, and reliable governments matter more than competitive ones.
It’s a familiar story in the Western Balkans, where Prime Minister Edi Rama – like several of his regional counterparts – has mastered the art of playing the “reliable partner” in the eyes of Europe, even if it means turning domestic political competition into little more than a scripted performance.
Under the pretext of “stability,” Rama has maintained strong backing from EU institutions. Despite high-ranking members of his party facing charges on corruption and abuse-of-power charges, and despite the repeated warnings in the EU’s own Progress Reports highlighting widespread corruption and rule-of-law deficiencies, this support has remained largely unchanged.
The Albanian Prime Minister has particularly bolstered his international legitimacy through transactional diplomacy. Recently, the Italy-Albania migration deal, endorsed by the European Commission, has also played a significant role in Rama’s strategy for consolidating external legitimacy. By agreeing to host Italian asylum processing centers, Rama has secured political validation and financial support from both Rome and Brussels, all under the guise of “shared European values”.
In light of this, during the campaign, Rama engineered a binary political landscape, portraying himself as the only viable choice against a discredited opposition led by Sali Berisha. In doing so, he marginalized alternative voices and positioned himself as indispensable, both to the Albanian electorate and to EU policymakers.
The outcome is a dangerous trade-off. As long as Rama delivers on EU interests, such as migration outsourcing, his government’s democratic backsliding is likely to be ignored, providing him with a shield against domestic accountability and posing a serious threat to the region’s democratic future.
