The national elections held in May cemented the Socialist Party (PS) as Albania’s dominant political force, delivering a landslide victory and securing Prime Minister Edi Rama a historic fourth consecutive term in power — the longest of any party and leader since the 40-year rule of Enver Hoxha and his Party of Labour.
Una Hajdari is a reporter specializing in post-communist societies, with a particular focus on nationalist and far-right movements, as well as identity politics. She has extensive experience covering the Western Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe.
The results underscore Rama’s firm grip on the country’s political landscape — and quite literally every segment of public life in Albania. Now in his thirteenth year in power, his political dominance leaves the fragmented opposition with little leverage or room for political influence whatsoever.
Entrenched State Capture
Walk into any ministry building in Tirana and you quickly sense why Transparency International still gives Albania only 42 points out of 100 on its Corruption Perceptions Index, despite the country being recently declared a frontrunner for EU membership and ostensibly improving its previous score, landing at spot 80 instead of its previous 99.
Citizens regularly complain about a sluggish bureaucracy in which personal favours are often prioritized over regular state functioning, affecting everything from education and healthcare to public employment. The European Commission’s 2024 progress report on the country further drives the point home, especially after a sweeping criminal amnesty law passed by the ruling party cleared the records of 40 officials convicted by the anti-corruption court and reduced sentences for 65 more, undercutting the very bodies set up to clean house.
While several smaller parties tried to make inroads into minimizing the Socialists’ kleptocratic control over the state, hopes are not high among the populace that these practices will change anytime soon. When Albanians finally went to the polls on 11 May, international observers were blunt about what they saw: public-sector employees were bussed to pro-government rallies, patronage networks were activated across the country, and the pressure on voters was palpable. Journalists routinely caught party loyalists hanging around polling stations to pressure citizens to vote a certain way — making a level electoral playing field all but impossible.
Despite these and other clearly documented abuses, the chances that allegations of vote buying and intimidation will be addressed are slim. The country’s officially titled Complaints and Sanctions Commission continues to apply an extremely narrow interpretation of the rules concerning misuse of administrative resources, largely to the benefit of the party in power. Media pluralism fared no better, with Reporters Without Borders downgrading Albania to 99 out of 180 countries in its World Press Freedom Index, while monitors from the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights found the two biggest parties dominated media coverage of the polls, highlighting the fact that news outlets are largely in the hands of a small group of tycoons.
Whatever else the Socialist Party may be, it is certainly not the party of wealth redistribution or workers’ rights.
The Socialist government also amended the electoral code to stipulate that broadcasters must grant large parties twice as much free airtime than that granted to smaller parliamentary groups, leaving minor parties without a platform to reach potential supporters. To top it off, TikTok was banned ahead of the elections over claims that it exposed young users to violent content. While the claim is not without a degree of truth, the ban shut down a crucial platform used by opposition parties and activists right before a major election.
Things look equally grim on the climate front, with Brussels branding the watering down of Albania’s conservation laws last year a “negative development”, and activists warning that it will open the door to development along the Adriatic coast and the Vjosa delta that will destroy Albania’s natural beauty and resources. Well before that vote, NGOs had already dragged officials before the Energy Community Secretariat over hydropower concessions on the Vjosa, Europe’s last truly wild river.
Despite all of that, the economy, at least on paper, is booming. The World Bank still forecasts 3.2 percent growth in 2025, while cautioning that unfinished reforms and external shocks threaten to keep poverty and inequality stubbornly high. Yet total unemployment has gone up to an alarming 18.9 percent, a stark statistic that helps explain why so many talented graduates keep buying one-way tickets abroad.
Politics by Patronage
Roughly explained, the Albanian political system has functioned as a binary between the Socialists and the Democrats ever since the first elections were held in 1990.
Unlike the more violent transitions out of Communism that occurred in other parts of Europe, Albania’s shift to democracy was turbulent but relatively bloodless. The break with four decades of isolationist Communism began in December 1990, when thousands of university students in Tirana staged mass protests and a hunger strike against President Ramiz Alia, Hoxha’s heir. The demonstrations convinced Alia that retaliation would backfire, as it had elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc, and on 11 December, his ruling Party of Labour bowed to pressure and authorized political pluralism — a watershed decision that set the stage for Albania’s first multiparty elections in March 1991.
The very next day, dissident intellectuals — most prominent among them a cardiologist named Sali Berisha — founded the Democratic Party of Albania (PD), rallying average citizens as well as anticommunist activists and former political prisoners. Its platform was built around anticommunism, signing onto human rights agreements like the Helsinki Accords, a drive towards European modernization and, most damaging among them, a rapid transition to a market economy.
Nevertheless, the subsequent elections kept the Party of Labour in office. Fears of instability and unrest among the population after decades of one-party rule and isolation were rife, heightened by the growing unrest in neighbouring Yugoslavia. Labour’s hold was bolstered by a widespread system of clientelism and patronage, particularly in remote and rural areas, as the party still controlled the state, upon which voters depended for jobs, food, and basic services. Here, a trend emerged that would go on to mark every single election in Albania: namely, the reluctance of some segments of the population to endorse change due to perceived risk of instability. The longer any party stayed in power, the harder it would be for them to be removed from it.
Clients of the patronage system, referred to by the term patronazhistet, were also a common theme in the most recent campaign. Every additional year in office means more party loyalists on the payroll and an ever-steeper hill for challengers to climb. Not all party loyalists are part of the moneyed elite — they also include precariously employed families or individuals who latch onto any stable source of income that comes their way, and they are often motivated by the fear that the next group to come to power would offer even less.
Following defeat in snap elections in 1992, the Party of Labour promptly renamed itself to the Socialist Party and embraced, at least on the surface, Western European-style social democracy. These days, Edi Rama’s Socialists might still don the red rose, but they govern more like technocratic liberals, having abandoned the worker protections for which they once fought, while retaining the inclination towards centralized rule. Corporate profits are taxed at a flat 15 percent, among the lowest in Europe, which Rama has used to lure vulture capitalists from abroad to little or no benefit for locals.
Flagship infrastructure projects, even those meant to improve roads or connectivity, continue to be delivered through shadowy public-private partnerships. A 400-million-euro waste-to-energy scheme, the so-called “incinerator scandal”, has already sent one former minister to jail, but widespread opposition to the project has so far not swayed the ruling elite. Welfare spending, meanwhile, remains the lowest in the Western Balkan, while strikes are routinely met with police violence. Whatever else the Socialist Party may be, it is certainly not the party of wealth redistribution or workers’ rights.
Struggling to Break Through
Thus, the Socialists and Democrats have taken turns governing a country where the state still hands out most jobs and contracts. Over the past three decades, several smaller parties, such as the Socialist Movement for Integration (LSI), founded by former Prime Minister Ilir Meta and now called the Freedom Party, have attempted to break the duopoly, often acting as kingmakers in coalition governments.
Other parties, like the Republican Party or the Social Democratic Party, have occasionally won seats in parliament but failed to build lasting national influence. Despite frequent and public disillusionment with the two main electoral blocs, no third force has won broad support. Nevertheless, the platforms of these “smaller” movements are usually more thoughtful, targeting burning social issues and offering new approaches to tackling inequality.
Lëvizja Bashkë or the Together Movement, led by left-wing lecturer and activist Arlind Qori, ran on the slogan “The new is being born”. Lëvizja Bashkë grew out of Organizata Politike, a left-wing protest movement born in the aftershocks of the events of 21 January 2011, when police bullets killed four protesters outside the prime minister’s office. Its most recognizable face, Qori stepped out of the university classroom and into the streets, helping to weld the collective discontent into a permanent activist hub that convened weekly in a Tirana basement.
With a foothold in the legislature, a cadre network in mines, refineries, and campuses, and a solid track record of hard-won protest experience, Qori’s party is Albania’s best chance at not just banging at the palace gates, but shaping national policy.
Over the next decade, OP became the connective tissue of nearly every grassroots revolt in the country. Its members sheltered tuition-boycotting students during the 2018–2019 education protests that filled Tirana’s Skanderbeg Square with 20,000 young people demanding free public universities. They also spread outside the capital, building solidarity with the workers at the Bulqiza mine who walked off their jobs in 2019, the Ballsh oil refinery workers in a 44-day hunger strike over unpaid wages in 2020–2021, or when they marched alongside seamstresses in March 2022. OP provided lawyers, megaphones, wrote strike leaflets, and even helped them procure food for their families.
That record explains why many Albanians now see OP as the country’s only “authentic” left-wing movement. Its programme, which includes progressive taxation for the highest earners, a living wage, strong independent unions, green public infrastructure, and genuinely free schooling, stands in deliberate contrast to the ruling Socialists’ flat-tax neoliberalism. In a landscape where most “third parties” gradually become clientelist satellites, OP’s stubborn, volunteer-run presence on picket lines has made it the reference point for anyone searching for a serious alternative to the ruling elite.
In late 2022, the collective took the next logical step, transforming itself into Lëvizja Bashkë with Qori as founding chair. Bashkë surprised observers by winning 4.8 percent and a seat on Tirana’s municipal council in the 2023 local elections, then carried that momentum into the 2025 general election, where it secured 1.5 percent nationwide and one seat in the 140-member parliament
While those numbers could be seen as a disappointment, no other explicitly left-wing force has ever crossed the parliamentary threshold in post-Communist Albania. With a foothold in the legislature, a cadre network in mines, refineries, and campuses, and a solid track record of hard-won protest experience, Qori’s party is Albania’s best chance at not just banging at the palace gates, but shaping national policy.
The End of Opposition?
The Democratic Party was in power for most of the 1990s and again from 2005–13, but over a decade of defeats has pushed it to the brink of irrelevance. After losing to Rama in 2013, founding leader Sali Berisha ceded control to young lawyer Lulzim Basha, who failed to make significant inroads into power. The PD fell again in 2017, then boycotted the parliament in 2019, hoping mass street protests and a boycott of local elections would force snap elections. Instead, the Socialists won nearly every municipality and governed unimpeded, while the opposition forfeited two years of institutional leverage.
The April 2021 election lifted PD support to 59 seats, yet it was still Rama’s third straight victory. Worse followed in May 2021, when US officials branded Berisha persona non grata based on claims of “significant corruption”. Under US pressure, Basha expelled his mentor from the PD’s parliamentary group, prompting a grassroots revolt within the party and its split into two factions, with Berisha controlling the larger and more influential segment. Berisha pressed on even after Albania’s special anti-corruption office indicted him in September 2023 and placed him under house arrest that December. His faction staged frequent protests throughout 2024, casting him as a victim of biased courts seeking to destroy Albania’s only opposition party.
With the opposition in disarray and no clear successor in sight, Rama now stands as Albania’s unrivalled political force.
This time around, the Democrats sought to cast their lot with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement by hiring top campaign strategist Chris LaCivita as well as his collaborator Paul Manafort, known for meddling in Ukraine during the first Trump term. The party sought to use the Trump association to rally conservatives and attract diaspora votes. Critics at home and abroad called the move tone-deaf, and doubted Albanians would embrace Trumpian rhetoric.
When the dust had settled, Rama had secured a record fourth term with 82 seats and 52 percent of the vote, while a fractured PD posted its worst tally since 1997. With legal battles unresolved, its founder indicted, and rival factions still trading blows, the question is no longer whether the Democrats can return to power, but whether they can remain a coherent party at all. Their potential demise would have huge implications for Albanian politics, where the Democrats, so far, continue to be seen as the only meaningful opposition.
The Supreme Leader
Since taking office in 2013, Edi Rama has presided over the longest stretch of uninterrupted rule in Albania’s post-Communist era. His government cites the sweeping “vetting” of judges and prosecutors — roughly 60 percent of those screened have resigned or been dismissed — as proof of institutional overhaul, although the vacancies have slowed court proceedings and prompted repeated appeals from Brussels and domestic bar associations for concrete changes beyond cosmetic fixes.
Rama’s tenure also coincided with Albania’s formal start of EU accession talks in July 2022. While the European Commission’s progress reports praise steps such as streamlined customs rules and the adoption of parts of the EU acquis, they still highlight modest results in prosecuting high-level corruption and money-laundering cases. The prime minister calls the drawn-out process “work in progress” while opposition politicians say enforcement remains selective.
Freedom House still labels Albania “partly free”, a classification that keeps the country in the democratic yet imperfect column rather than clearly autocratic. International observers likewise judged the elections as being “competitive and professionally conducted”, yet underlined the ruling Socialists’ widespread use of administrative resources. International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy indices rank Albania as a “weak democracy”, but a step above Serbia, the region’s lone hybrid regime, and well short of being classed an autocracy. Taken together, these watchdog findings suggest Edi Rama is not an outright autocrat — yet. But his growing command over state resources, media, and public contracts is eroding checks and balances and nudging Albania down a path that could, without corrective pressure, narrow the democratic space still further.
With the opposition in disarray and no clear successor in sight, Rama now stands as Albania’s unrivalled political force, heavily blurring the line between party and state and taking the country into unchartered waters. What was once a pluralistic system where power could reasonably be challenged is beginning to resemble a one-man show, where institutional checks are fading and electoral competition is increasingly symbolic. The EU may still attempt to shape the timeline of reforms and inject its influence, but inside the country, the real question is no longer about policy, but whether Albania is slowly sliding into a soft autocracy, cloaked in the language of development and integration.