Berisha Alone on the Ballot: PD Disqualifies Every Rival as 23 May Vote Turns into a Referendum

The Newsroom

The Democratic Party’s Commission for the Organization and Control of Electoral Operations has formally disqualified every announced challenger to Sali Berisha in the 23 May leadership contest, leaving the former prime minister as the sole candidate in a process that the PD itself once described as the most consequential internal vote since the Refoundation Commission years.

Two of the five aspirants, Dr. Mereme Sela and Vladimir Mulaj, were rejected on the merits. The Commission ruled that Sela, a physician who declared her candidacy 24 hours earlier, “does not have a high public and political profile” sufficient to qualify; Mulaj, whose name surfaced only on Friday, was dismissed as “unknown” and lacking “experience in the leadership of democratic structures.” The other three, Evi Kokalari, Alesia Balliu, and Ervin Salianji, were ruled out on a procedural basis. Their submissions, the Commission held, “were not presented by a member of the Democratic Party” and therefore “cannot be considered.” This is the so-called doctrine of self-exclusion: Berisha’s apparatus has maintained for months that Salianji is no longer a PD member, and on Friday extended the same logic to two further declared candidates.

The result is that what was billed as a leadership election has, on its own terms, ceased to be one. There is one name on the ballot. The vote of 23 May is now structurally a referendum on Berisha, conducted under rules written by Berisha, supervised by an apparatus appointed by Berisha, and ratified by an Assembly to be convened a week later.

Sela: courts, SPAK, embassies, EU mission

Mereme Sela learned of her disqualification through the press. In a written statement issued on Friday afternoon, she opened with a single sentence intended for the public record: “I, Mereme Sela, candidate for the chairmanship of the Democratic Party of Albania, hereby inform the public that the elections for chairman and the related procedures are being manipulated.”

She then announced four parallel actions. She would file a formal appeal with the Tirana Court seeking the suspension of the entire electoral process as “unlawful, unjust, unequal, and in contradiction with the statute of the PD.” She would request that SPAK open an investigation into what she called “the corrupted electoral process within the Democratic Party by the defendant Sali Berisha, who is also charged with other criminal offences.” She would write to the Embassy of the United States, the Embassy of the United Kingdom, and the European Union mission in Tirana, “to inform them and to request assistance, given that the former chairman Sali Berisha has taken the party hostage and is not allowing the conduct of free and fair elections.” And she would address the press, “so that the Democratic Party is not destroyed but democratised.”

Sela’s central argument is statutory and pointed:

“The only person who does not meet the criteria of the statute is the former chairman Sali Berisha, who lost the elections of 2025 and is not legally permitted under the party statute to compete for the chairman’s role.”

She also delivered the line that will travel furthest in foreign chanceries: “The Democratic Party cannot come to power with a leader who is non grata in Washington and London.”

The reference is to Berisha’s designation under Section 7031(c) of the United States foreign assistance act, imposed by the State Department in May 2021, and the parallel measure announced by the United Kingdom in July 2022. Both remain in force. Five years and a change of administration in Washington have produced no reversal. Sela’s framing places that failure at the centre of the question of leadership legitimacy.

She named the five disqualified candidates by name in her statement and called the collective decision “an attentat against democracy within the party.” She closed with a line aimed at the institutional habit she believes the PD has built around such moments: “Based on past experience, I do not expect any serious reaction or response from the Democratic Party, since this has been a repeated practice over the years. This pattern is among the principal reasons why the Democratic Party finds itself in the situation it is in today.”

Salianji: not the courts, but the EPP and the embassies

Ervin Salianji, the former MP whose months-long internal challenge has set the political temperature for the entire race, gave a long interview to Report TV within hours of the Commission’s decision. His framing was less juridical than political. He chose, deliberately, not to take the matter to court.

“I have avoided sending it to court because the courts are controlled by the Rama-Berisha regime. They would deliver a verdict in favour of the regime, and besides, I do not want to drag the PD into this confrontation,” he said. “Every conflict should have been resolved by vote. The vote and support are what separate a politician from a clown.”

What he intends to do instead is take the file to the European People’s Party and to the diplomatic missions in Tirana. “I have communicated and will communicate during the week with the entire international factor on this clownishness that is being staged in the PD,” he said. “I will inform the EPP, given that the PD is part of the EPP.”

His characterisation of Berisha’s position was sharper than at any previous point in the race:

“Berisha does not have the support of Democrats. He is a coward who avoids confrontation with Democrats and usurps the PD. If he had support, Berisha would have entered the race and won by competition.”

And on the substance of the process itself:

“Berisha is staging a farce to usurp the office of chairman in violation of the statute, the law, and the constitution. Since September, Berisha is not legally chairman of the PD and has no right to re-candidate. We are in the conditions of usurpation of office.”

He drew the parallel with the governing party explicitly: “We are in a Rama-Berisha regime. Rama has problems with the general elections; Berisha has erased internal elections and internal democracy entirely. Rama profits from political power, Berisha from opposition power and other benefits.”

Salianji also dismantled the Commission’s procedural ground for excluding him by quoting the apparatus back to itself. “By decision of the PD Presidency, my conviction was characterised as a political conviction. Berisha himself has stated that I am a living martyr of democracy and of free speech,” he said. “Because of what is called the regime, Berisha has far greater problems with the law than I do. You are not blocked from the party because of the decriminalisation law.” A leadership that has on the record described his sentence as political and his standing as that of a martyr cannot, in the same year, invoke that sentence to exclude him from competing.

He also confirmed the political logic behind Sela’s disqualification. “He rejected her after her interview where she said she would not even take Berisha as a director or deputy minister, that the party needs new young men. He was afraid of her popularity. Set against Berisha, she was a very serious candidacy.”

The Facebook statement: the loss of the last castle

The fuller indictment came in a written statement Salianji posted on social media earlier the same afternoon. The register is harder than the interview and the imagery, in the original Albanian, lands with weight that the English barely transmits.

“The miserable standard with which Berisha is treating the Democratic Party expresses a profound lack of historical responsibility for the sacrifices of Democrats who have languished in opposition for 13 years,” he wrote. “The exposure of this statesman to the point of total degradation, through divisions, idiocies, imagined friends and enemies, vile lies and falsehoods that have left Democrats on the streets for 13 years, expresses the loss of the last castle he had managed to conceal: courage.”

He named the moral pressure the apparatus uses against its own base: “He and the circle clinging to him abuse the loyalty and values of Democrats, placing them under moral pressure to remain silent out of respect for age, to remain silent before the honours that have been granted to them, to remain silent before the extinction of the PD because of their association with him.”

He posed the questions of accountability for the May 2025 result that the apparatus has not answered: “Who bears responsibility for the deepest defeat since 1997, on 11 May 2025? Who drew up the lists? Who wrote the banal programme as if it were 1995? Who directed the campaign?” The implication, repeated through the statement, is that the same hand is now writing the rules of his own ratification.

Then the compressed indictment that travels well in Brussels: “He is consumed, isolated, investigated, incapable of uniting the opposition. Every day he remains at the head of the Democratic Party of Albania is a loss for the opposition and for Albania.”

He closed on the line he wants in the chancery cables. “The Democratic Party cannot be the party of one individual; it does not deserve to be. The PD does not deserve to be extinguished because of its leader. They have miscalculated, particularly with me and with the majority of Democrats. The hour calls on Democrats not to remain silent.”

Noka, Agasi, and the AKSHI dossier

In a separate exchange with the PD Secretary General Flamur Noka, who had publicly accused Salianji of links to organised crime and to the AKSHI tender fugitive Ergys Agasi, Salianji turned the charge back. He claimed that Agasi has long been “a close link to people close to Berisha,” that the PD never denounced him until SPAK declared him a fugitive, and that the Berisha leadership has avoided naming the so-called Troplinë criminal group or the second AKSHI fugitive Ermal Beqiri. He also alleged that, during his own imprisonment, the PD declined to forward to SPAK the report of its parliamentary inquiry on TIMS because, in his words, “in that report it emerged that they were Agasi’s people, that Ermal Beqiri was involved.” The detail matters because it places the question of selective denunciation, not just selective ratification, inside the same week.

The statute working group, in parallel

While the Commission was closing the ballot, a separate body inside the same headquarters was opening the rulebook itself. The PD Working Group on statutory revisions held its first session on Friday and approved its calendar. Members of the Party, the Presidency, the National Council, the Parliamentary Group, and the National Assembly may submit proposals between 1 and 10 May. The Working Group will review the proposals between 11 and 14 May. Drafting and the final submission of proposed amendments will run from 15 to 20 May. The Presidency and the National Council are to ratify the package by 25 May. The National Assembly will give final approval on 30 May, exactly one week after the leadership vote. Until the package reaches the Presidency, the Working Group’s deliberations are confidential and its meetings closed.

Report TV’s reporting confirms what the political market had already priced in. The “Basha article,” the statutory rule that requires the chairman to leave the party after losing a parliamentary election, will not be removed; the question, after twelve months of selective non-application, is academic. What is on the table is the system of primaries, the signature reform Berisha himself announced with fanfare and which is now being reconsidered “with scepticism” inside the apparatus, given that the membership vote has not consistently delivered the outcomes headquarters expected.

The sequencing is its own message. A leadership ratification on 23 May, conducted with no rivals on the ballot, followed by a statutory rewrite on 30 May, conducted by the same leadership the ratification has just confirmed. The order of operations forecloses any structural challenge from inside the new term before it begins.

The wider frame

The picture that has come into focus over the last twelve months is now complete. A non grata chairman, blocked from Washington and London, has retained the leadership of the country’s main opposition party by a process from which every named challenger has been removed. The only remaining venues of contestation, on the disqualified candidates’ own account, are the Tirana Court, SPAK, the European People’s Party, and the diplomatic missions. None of these is a PD body.

Whether the EPP, which counts the PD among its members, will treat a leadership election with one candidate as a leadership election at all is now a question for Brussels. The state of play in Tirana has answered itself.