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

By Fatos Bytyci

TIRANA (Reuters) - Albanian 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 claims the vote was stolen.

With 98% of ballots counted, the Socialist Party (PS) had 52% of the votes, with the runner-up Democratic Party (PD) on 34%, 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 vote 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.

In a statement, European Commission Vice President Kaja Kallas and the EU's enlargement commissioner Marta Kos said the vote was "highly polarised", that contestants "did not enjoy a level playing field", and that authorities should investigate allegations of "electoral crimes".

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 iron-fisted communist rule until 1990.

RAMA POWER

Rama, in power since 2013, had been favourite to win the election, bolstered by an 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. 

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

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

"No one expected there to be a qualified majority for a single party. It is like (Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor) 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...by the ruling party" in the campaign. It cited "reports of pressure on public employees and other voters as well as cases of intimidation".

(Reporting by Fatos Bytyci and Ivana Sekularac; writing by Edward McAllister; editing by Hugh Lawson and Mark Heinrich)