PD Expels Two Durrës Councillors After Salianji Meetings

the Newsroom (Tirana)

he Democratic Party has removed two members of its municipal council group in Durrës, the first concrete disciplinary action against figures associated with Ervin Salianji’s internal challenge to Sali Berisha’s leadership.

Party Secretary General Flamur Noka signed a decision dated March 23 expelling Dritan Burgija, who served as group leader on the Durrës Municipal Council, and Arlind Boshku, who also held the position of secretary of the Durrës PD branch. Both men retain their council seats but no longer sit under the PD banner. Ardian Muka, a former Durrës branch chairman, has been proposed as Burgija’s replacement as group leader.

Noka framed the expulsions in terms unrelated to the Salianji dispute, and opened his statement by accusing government media of disinformation about the decision’s motives. His substantive claim was that Boshku had worked for the Socialist Party during the May 11, 2025 elections and that Burgija had exploited his council position for personal gain, also allegedly in coordination with PS. “Any other interpretation is fabrication,” Noka said.

Both men rejected that account. Burgija called the decision “absurd, arrogant, and without basis,” describing it as an act of panic rather than political strength. Boshku was more pointed, accusing Noka of having solicited undocumented financial contributions from party structures before and after elections. The exchange exposes a division that runs deeper than this episode: one side is arguing about representation, meritocracy, and internal democracy; the other is arguing about loyalty, discipline, and control. When those grammars no longer overlap, a party is no longer managing disagreement. It is suppressing it.

Salianji, who has been conducting a series of public meetings with Democratic Party members in preparation for a potential challenge to Berisha in the May 23 party leadership election, described the expulsions as the work of “losers who want to choose their own voters.” His candidacy remains formally blocked: the party maintains he is no longer a member.

The reactions from within the party measure the damage. Ndrec Pjetri, the most voted candidate on PD’s open list in Durrës in the last elections, noted that roughly 5,000 of his votes came with the direct support of the two men now expelled. His reaction went further than wounded loyalty. Calling the decision a scandal, he drew an explicit line from the party’s current behavior to the exclusionary logic of the Party of Labour, the communist party that ruled Albania under Enver Hoxha until 1991 and whose defining instrument of control was the progressive elimination of internal dissent. The comparison, in Albanian political memory, is not rhetorical. It is the sharpest available accusation. Pjetri laid out the sequence: first Salianji was expelled, then Burgija and Boshku. “And tomorrow?” he asked. The question named a pattern and pointed at its destination. Alesia Balliu, a declared candidate for the PD chairmanship, argued that the PS-collaboration justification is being applied selectively, pointing to figures with documented government ties who face no equivalent scrutiny.

Former PD deputy Edmond Spaho added a dimension the other reactions left implicit: the cost to the party’s own human capital. Writing on social media, Spaho said he had known both men for more than fifteen years and that their families had contributed to the party since its founding, including financially. He described the accusation of PS collaboration as shameful precisely because it inverts reality, deployed, as he put it, by people who are themselves PS collaborators. His warning was directed not at the leadership but at those inside the party still choosing silence. “Today we stay quiet,” he wrote, “tomorrow we experience it ourselves.” The line captures something the formal reactions do not: that the real audience for these expulsions is not Burgija and Boshku, but everyone watching who has not yet spoken.

Together, the reactions suggest the expulsions have not closed the question of internal legitimacy. They have widened it.

The pattern matters as much as the particulars. A party that has remained in opposition for thirteen consecutive years must at some point answer two questions: why is it losing, and who gets to ask. The Durrës decision answers the second by foreclosing it. When those willing to name the reasons for failure are removed from the room, the party loses not just dissent but diagnosis. That is not consolidation. It is a structural incapacity for renewal.