Albania's Rama on brink of landslide election win

Albania's prime minister Edi Rama has secured an unprecedented fourth term in power as his Socialist Party sailed to victory in Sunday's parliamentary election, a near complete vote count showed on Tuesday.

With 94% of ballots counted, the Socialist Party (PS) had 52% of the votes, ahead of the second-placed Democratic Party (PD) on 34%, official figures from the election commission showed, although international observers questioned the fairness of the poll.

The state election commission is due to announce full results on Tuesday.

If confirmed, the result would mark an improvement on the last election when PS got 49%, and it would give Rama a comfortable majority 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.

Rama, in power since 2013, was the favourite to win, 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.

But 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 looks set to 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.

PS is on course to win 82 seats in the 140-seat parliament while PD would get 51 seats, local Top Channel TV said.

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

But ordinary voters at home say he runs the country on a system of patronage and has done little to eradicate graft and unemployment. Rama denies this, and yet hundreds of thousands of Albanians have emigrated since he came to power, in search of better prospects abroad.

Rama's tumultuous third term was marked by riots over a perceived crackdown on the opposition and a series of corruption scandals.

An international election monitoring mission led by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 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."

The government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on that.

Source: Reuters