"International observers dismiss elections", Reuters: Voting integrity questioned

Albania's Prime Minister Edi Rama has secured an unprecedented fourth term in power after his Socialist Party won Sunday's parliamentary elections, according to a nearly complete vote count on Tuesday.

With 94% of votes counted, the Socialist Party (SP) had 52% of the vote, ahead of the Democratic Party (DP) in second place with 34%, according to official data from the electoral commission, although international observers questioned the fairness of the vote.

The State Election Commission is expected to announce the full results on Tuesday.

If confirmed, the result would mark an improvement over the last election when the SP took 49%, and would give Rama a comfortable majority to form a government. It would also allow him to continue working to fulfill his promise to bring Albania into the European Union by 2030, although many experts say that timeline is optimistic.

Rama, in power since 2013, was the favorite to win, supported in part by an influential network built over 12 years in power, a recent period of healthy economic growth and a fragmented opposition.

But the size of the victory has surprised some analysts who had expected corruption scandals and recent unrest to damage Rama's lead.

Instead, the landslide victory 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.

"Nobody expected there to be a qualified majority for a single party. It's like (Hungarian Prime Minister) Orban in his best days," said political analyst Lutfi Dervishi.

The SP is on track to win 82 seats in the 140-seat parliament, while the DP will take 51 seats, according to local television station Top Channel.

Rama has won favors from the West by accepting immigrants from Italy and sheltering Afghans awaiting visa processing for the United States.

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

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

An international election monitoring mission led by the Organization 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 this. / Reuters