Activist shot during Albania election

TIRANA: A politician was injured and an activist died in a shoot-out during an Albanian parliamentary election on Sunday, a vote being watched by Western allies worried about democracy in the Nato country.

The left is bidding to deny Prime Minister Sali Berisha a third successive four-year term, unprecedented in Albania since the fall of its hardline communist regime in 1991.

But the threat of a disputed result is rising, after a political row left the top electoral body, the Central Election Commission, short-staffed and unable to certify the result.

Since 1991, Albania has never held an election deemed fully free and fair, and failure again would further set back its ambitions to join the European Union.

Opposition Socialist Party leader Edi Rama cancelled his own scheduled vote to travel to the northwestern region of Lac where an opposition activist was killed in a shoot-out involving an election candidate of Berisha’s ruling Democratic Party.

Police confirmed the shoot-out outside a polling station and the death of a 53-year-old man. News reports said the ruling party candidate, Mhill Fufi, was seriously wounded and being treated in the Tirana military hospital.

Berisha, a fiery former cardiologist, had earlier called on Albanians to vote “in a civilised manner”.

“I assure them their vote will be fully respected,” he told reporters after voting with his wife, Liri, in the capital.

“I voted No. 44 (Democratic Party), I touched fate, a feeling of pleasure engulfed me, a feeling I have not felt before,” he said.

Opinion polls are unreliable, but point to a narrow victory for the Socialist Party of 48-year-old Rama, a former Tirana Mayor. He has been buoyed by an alliance with a small leftist party previously in coalition with Berisha.

Rama lost the last election in 2009, called protesters into the streets and four were shot dead by security forces.

DISPUTES, DELAYS

Berisha has dominated Albanian political life since the collapse of its Stalinist regime triggered a breakneck and sometimes violent transition to capitalism. At 68, defeat on Sunday could spell the end of his career.

Including Albanian migrant workers abroad, there are 3.27 million eligible voters. That is more than the official resident population of 2.8 million people, from Albania’s rugged Alps in the north, down an Adriatic coastline still undiscovered by Western tourists, to the Ionian sea off Greece.

Polls opened at 7am (0500 GMT) and close at 7pm (1700 GMT). Official results are due in the evening, but a system by which party members count the ballots has repeatedly led to disputes and delays.

Rama withdrew the opposition’s three representatives from the seven-member Central Election Commission in April after the coalition government sacked a member whose party had allied with the Socialists for the election.

The Socialists and Berisha’s Democratic Party differ little on Albania’s strategic goal of joining the European Union or its pro-Western policy. But their confrontational relationship does not sit easy with Brussels or Albania’s Nato allies.

The EU says the election is a test of Albania’s democratic institutions and its progress towards the 27-nation bloc, which Croatia will join in July. Albania applied to join four years ago but has not yet been made a candidate for membership.

The next government will take on an economy feeling the effects of the crisis in the Eurozone, notably in Greece and Italy where about 1 million Albanians work and send money home.

While Albania has avoided recession, remittances are down and public debt and the budget deficit are rising.

“I hope and wish the elections will turn out to be very good,” shopkeeper Teuta Muskaj, a mother of two unemployed law graduates, said after voting in central Tirana. “I expect better things for the future of my children. We sacrificed a lot to educate them.”