The Party He Built to Destroy

The Democratic Party has no founders left, no dissidents, no independent voices. Berisha removed them deliberately. The question now is what survives him.

Tirana Examiner Analysis

Sali Berisha has now expelled more internal enemies than Enver Hoxha and Stalin produced between them. The observation comes from analyst Kreshnik Spahiu, and it deserves to be taken not as hyperbole but as arithmetic. In 36 years, the Democratic Party has generated 17 internal factions. It contains no founder of the December 8 movement, no former political prisoner, no dissident, no former landowner. Every constituency that gave the party its original moral authority has been processed out. What remains is a structure with one remaining function: keeping its leader in place.

That function now runs in open contradiction with what the party nominally exists to do. An opposition party exists to offer an alternative government. The PD under Berisha offers a continuous performance of irreplaceability. The protests are not primarily pressure on Edi Rama. They are a signal to Brussels, London, and Berlin: that Berisha is the opposition, that no credible alternative exists within reach, that removing him produces only vacuum. The message is coercive in both directions, inward toward members who might otherwise move, and outward toward external actors who have already decided they want him gone.

Those actors are not being subtle about it. PD delegations visiting Strasbourg, Brussels, and Berlin have returned with a consistent read: Western partners are working to create the conditions for a leadership transition. This is not diplomatic preference. It is structural necessity. Political alternation in Albania requires a functional center-right party, and a functional center-right party cannot be anchored to a figure under American non grata designation since 2021. The democratic consolidation arithmetic does not work with Berisha still in the equation.

He knows this, which is why the purges accelerate. Every figure who meets with international partners becomes a candidate for expulsion. Every internal critic becomes an agent of foreign interference. The logic is not paranoia. It is rational self-preservation conducted at the institution’s expense. Berisha cannot afford a party with independent weight because an independent party is one he cannot fully control, and a party he cannot fully control is one that can move without him.

This is what the Hoxha-Stalin comparison actually measures. Not scale or violence, but organizational grammar. Both men ran parties in which the production of enemies was itself the instrument of cohesion. Loyalty was the only operative criterion, and disloyalty was manufactured on demand rather than discovered. The result was a party whose unity was fictitious, held together not by genuine alignment but by fear, calculation, and the absence of a visible alternative. Berisha’s PD fits this template with uncomfortable precision, and has for some time.

The trap closes on itself. The more aggressively he suppresses internal alternatives, the more he confirms the Western judgment that produced the non grata designation. The more convincingly he performs irreplaceability, the more urgently external actors work to prove him wrong. He has constructed a logic that sustains him in the short term and compounds his exposure over time, with no exit available that does not require dismantling the apparatus that keeps him standing.

What comes after remains unresolved. The international investment in a successor leadership is real; the delivery is not. Credible replacements require figures willing to absorb the cost of direct confrontation, and a political environment in which that confrontation does not end in quiet migration toward the governing majority. Neither condition holds yet. But the direction of pressure is not in dispute.

A party that has expelled every founder, every dissident, every independent voice it once claimed to represent is not functioning as a political organization. It is a holding structure for one career. Berisha did not arrive there through misfortune or circumstance. He built it, expulsion by expulsion, over three decades. The only open question now is whether anything worth inheriting remains when he is finally done.