Salianji Demands PD Documentation of His Expulsion, Sets a Falsifiable Test for the 23 May Vote

Ervin Salianji, the former Democratic Party MP barred from running for the party’s chairmanship, said this week he will file a formal demand with PD headquarters seeking the documentation of his exclusion, including the decision itself, its stated grounds, and the date on which it was taken. He disclosed the move in an interview on Report TV’s Repolitix programme with Denis Minga, in which he also set out a publicly verifiable test for the integrity of the 23 May internal vote.

The procedural escalation lands as Democratic Party members are scheduled to choose a chairman in what Sali Berisha, 82, has described as a regular contested election. Five declared candidates have been blocked from the ballot, leaving Berisha as the sole contender. The United States Department of State has designated Berisha under Section 7031(c) since May 2021 for what Washington described as significant corruption, and the United Kingdom announced parallel sanctions later that year. Both remain in force.

The political core of Salianji’s intervention rested on a single quotation. In 2019, when PD had been led for a period by a single uncontested candidate, Berisha himself denounced the arrangement in absolute terms. The phrase Salianji read back to him, drawn from Berisha’s own 2019 declaration, was that whoever defends a race with one candidate as honest deserves the shame of history. Berisha now defends a race with one candidate as democratic. The leader has already supplied the standard by which the current process must be judged.

He paired the citation with a wager that can be measured. Salianji predicted that the official participation figure on 23 May will be reported in the region of 54,000, while the actual number of members casting ballots will not exceed 10,000, implying a reported participation roughly five times the real turnout. The bet matters precisely because it is publicly recorded and verifiable after the fact. The gap, if it materialises as predicted, will be available to anyone, including diplomatic observers, who cares to look.

Salianji widened his diagnosis to a structural claim: that PD has been effectively captured, with internal competition foreclosed by a leadership unwilling to permit genuine alternation. He argued that the party machinery now rests on patronage rather than political support, challenging journalists to identify a single person inside the apparatus, drawing no salary from it, who maintains that Berisha can return PD to government. He placed exclusive responsibility for PD’s 2025 parliamentary defeat on Berisha personally, asking who had controlled the candidate lists and the political programme. He added that at least three sitting PD deputies are prepared to back his candidacy publicly should he ask them to do so, a claim that cannot be independently confirmed but which, if substantiated, would mark the first open parliamentary fracture inside Berisha’s caucus.

To position himself as a long-standing internal dissenter rather than an opportunist, Salianji revisited PD’s 2019 decision to relinquish parliamentary mandates, saying he had warned internally at the time that the move would politically destroy the party despite broad consensus behind it within the leadership. The structure now reproducing itself, on his account, is the same structure that produced earlier strategic catastrophes.

A separate observation cut closer to the transatlantic question. According to Salianji, no foreign ambassador now enters PD headquarters. Berisha, he said, compensates by staging meetings with private acquaintances, including German contacts, presented as international engagements. The claim is consistent with what diplomatic observers in Tirana have noted for some time: the operating channels between the major embassies and the formal opposition have narrowed to the point of irrelevance.

Salianji was explicit that his campaign remains an internal movement within PD rather than an attempt to construct a parallel formation, saying he would continue the fight inside PD and with the Democrats. He ruled out any repetition of the events of 8 January 2022, when supporters of Berisha forced entry into PD headquarters during the leadership struggle with Lulzim Basha. “I will not produce a situation that dishonours anyone,” he said.