The Rerun That Buried the Race

How a Saturday vote with one name on the ballot exposed the architecture of the party Sali Berisha now owns outright, and the limits of the challenge mounted against him

Legal Desk The Tirana Examiner

The bulletin that members of the Democratic Party of Albania marked on 23 May in 87 voting centres across 77 branches carried a single name, Sali Berisha, and three options: in favour, against, abstain. The party’s official tally returned 37,341 in favour, 1,055 against, 506 abstentions, against a registered membership disclosed mid-process as 51,737. Berisha called it “the most extraordinary vote.” On the structural facts, it was something narrower: a confidence vote conducted in the form of a leadership election, the first such confirmation in 36 years of party history conducted without a competing candidate. The distinction matters because the post-vote contest now opening, with the former MP Ervin Salianji refusing to recognise the result as legitimate, will turn on whether the 23 May process is described as a race or as a ratification.

The architecture by which that outcome was secured deserves an account. Five members declared an interest in standing against Berisha: Salianji, the former MP and current movement leader; Alesia Balliu, the jurist; Evi Kokalari, the New York based commentator; Mereme Sela, who appealed to SPAK and the Tirana court for suspension of the process; and Vladimir Mulaj. None reached the ballot. The instrument that removed them was a guideline on candidate criteria published 24 hours before the registration deadline, which Balliu has publicly attributed to the law firm associated with Shkëlzen Berisha, and which excluded from candidacy any member with a final conviction and any person not currently registered in the refreshed membership rolls. Salianji was ruled out on the second ground. The party’s general secretary stated that he was no longer a member, with the membership refresh as the proximate mechanism. Balliu was excluded on ethics-code grounds; Sela received notice of her disqualification through media reports. The Kryesia ratified the Komisioni i Organizimit’s recommendations unanimously.

This is the procedural spine of the process now under contest. It will be useful to keep it in view, because much of the public argument since 23 May has run past it.

What the official numbers say, and what they do not say
Selia Blu disclosed the registered membership figure of 51,737 four hours into the voting day. This figure had not previously been made public. Reported figures from the 2021 period under Lulzim Basha placed PD membership at approximately 75,000, a figure cited in Albanian media coverage of the subsequent rithemelimi process and which the current leadership has not directly contested. Between those two markers, the party went through the rithemelimi exercise initiated by Berisha after his return to the chair in 2022, which the leadership has consistently presented as a renewal of the rolls and which its critics, Salianji among them, characterise as a contraction managed to favour control over the listings.

On the disclosed figure, turnout was 39,441, or 76.2 per cent of registered members. Of those, 38,902 ballots were ruled valid. Berisha received 37,341 in favour, which is 96.0 per cent of valid votes and 72.2 per cent of registered membership. Against the 2021 Basha-era membership base, 37,341 represents under half. This is not an editorial observation; it is arithmetic. The Korçë-Pustec branch, the only branch for which Euronews Albania published a granular figure, recorded total participation of 9.4 per cent of its rolls, with 392 members voting in favour of Berisha. The 9.4 per cent figure has not been generalised to other branches in any published reporting we can locate. The party has not released a branch-by-branch breakdown.

Salianji’s competing figure, that no more than 5,000 demokratë actually participated, was offered at a Tuesday press conference on the basis of monitoring conducted by his network across the branches. He provided no methodology, no monitor count, and no branch-level data to support the figure. The honest editorial position on this is plain: the 39,441 figure is the official one and rests on the party’s own count; the 5,000 figure is Salianji’s, rests on his own monitoring, and has not been substantiated in any form that allows independent assessment. Treating the gap between them as established fact, in either direction, would be an evidentiary failure. The gap itself, however, is part of the post-vote contest, because the legitimacy claim Salianji is now constructing rests on it.

The figure that is less contested and more revealing is the institutional one offered by Prof. Afrim Krasniqi of the Institute for Political Studies. Speaking to Deutsche Welle, Krasniqi observed that the rerun strengthens Berisha’s personal control over candidate lists for the 2027 and 2029 election cycles but generates no new political credit and brings no new supporters into the party. The point is structural rather than rhetorical: the confirmation consolidates incumbency, but incumbency at this scale of registered membership, against a 2021 base nearly 45 per cent larger, does not constitute electoral expansion. It constitutes the durable management of a contracted base.

The exclusion mechanism and the legitimacy claim
The legal question Salianji is now pressing in his Deutsche Welle interview and his Tuesday press conference is whether a confirmation produced through a candidacy framework designed 24 hours before the deadline can be characterised as a legitimate leadership election under the PD statute. He has stated that he will not recognise Berisha as a legitimate chairman, will continue his political action, and has appealed to the European People’s Party in an open letter. The procedural argument advanced by his legal allies, including the jurist Indrit Sefa, holds that no formal exclusion decision was issued against Salianji as a member, that the so-called “self-exclusion” is a formulation invented by Berisha and absent from the statute, and that the formal route for exclusion requires a Kryesia decision subject to appeal, which was not the path followed.

Set against this, the party’s position, articulated by legal secretary Ivi Kaso and by figures such as Albana Kalaja, is that candidacy criteria are determined by the statute, that contribution and merit constitute genuine thresholds, and that conduct against party interests, in Balliu’s case, ethical code violations and association with rival forces, properly disqualifies. Berisha himself has repeatedly stated that he has never personally engineered candidacies against himself, citing the precedents of Basha and the late Sokol Olldashi, and that he will not accept what he characterises as “false candidacies.”

The two positions are not symmetrical in their evidentiary requirements. The party’s position rests on the statute as currently interpreted by the bodies it controls. Salianji’s position rests on a claim that those bodies are interpreting the statute in a manner serving incumbency rather than the rule structure. The closest thing to an external arbiter would be the European People’s Party, of which the PD is an associate member, and to which Salianji has directed his letter.

That arbitration has not arrived. As of this writing, no statement from EPP President Manfred Weber, Secretary General Dolors Montserrat, or any constituent EPP party has been issued congratulating Berisha on his reconfirmation. Salianji, in his Tuesday remarks, described the European reaction as comprising “indirect signals” and “concerns about declining democratic standards,” without specifying form or interlocutor. Shqiptarja noted on 25 May that Berisha had received no congratulatory message from any sister party. Berisha’s own response on Sunday, that congratulations are “reciprocal” and that he does not send them either, is not the language of a chairman confident in his international standing. It is the language of a chairman acknowledging the silence and reframing it as discretion.

This silence is the most consequential feature of the international dimension. The EPP has been criticised, including in its own internal debates, for what observers have called selective enforcement of democratic standards among its members and associates. The pattern is documented in the cases of GERB in Bulgaria and other affiliates. Berisha himself spoke at the EPP Congress in Valencia on 29-30 April 2026, alongside leaders from non-EU member parties including Kosovo’s Lumir Abdixhiku, Georgia’s Tina Bokuchava, and Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko and Yulia Timoshenko. That speaking slot, four weeks before the rerun, was the public expression of EPP comfort with Berisha as the PD’s chairman. The absence of any reaction since 23 May is not yet a withdrawal of that comfort. It is a pause, and pauses in Brussels are read by the parties affected.

The condition Berisha now occupies
The strategic question raised by the rerun is not whether Berisha controls the PD. He does, more completely than at any point since his 2022 return. The question is what that control is for.

A party leader produces three outputs: candidate lists, message control, and the capacity to negotiate. The rerun secures the first decisively. Berisha will personally determine the PD’s candidates for the 2027 and 2029 cycles, with no internal mechanism credibly able to challenge his selections. The second, message control, was never seriously contested within the party; the Kryesia operates as a body that ratifies rather than deliberates. The third, the capacity to negotiate, is where the rerun’s costs become visible.

A chairman who cannot produce a competitive candidacy against himself, who must rely on a guideline issued 24 hours before deadline to remove credible challengers, and whose confirmation generates no public congratulation from his political family, is a chairman whose negotiating capacity with the European partners on whom Albanian opposition politics structurally depends has narrowed rather than widened. Berisha’s response, that he is “in expectation” and that the absence of congratulations is reciprocal, confirms this rather than refutes it. The chairmen of associate EPP parties do not generally maintain a posture of waiting to receive congratulations from Brussels; they receive them within hours of confirmation, or the silence becomes the story.

Taulant Balla’s Saturday characterisation of the process, that the result was predetermined regardless of the procedural form, is the position of the governing party, and it is in the PS’s interest to frame the rerun as a coronation. The framing is not for that reason wrong. Myslim Murrizi’s observation, that a process without candidates is a votëbesim and not a referendum, is more precise. The party itself, in the language deployed by spokesperson Belind Kelliçi and others in the run-up, used the word referendum. The retreat from that language since 23 May is small but real.

What Salianji can and cannot do
The case against Salianji’s challenge as a political force is straightforward: he has no party, no parliamentary group, and no mechanism for converting refusal of recognition into institutional consequence. His Tuesday claim that participation was 5,000 rather than 39,441 is not verifiable on his disclosure, and asserting it as fact rather than as his monitoring estimate weakens the rest of his argument. His characterisation of Berisha as “po aq i konsumuar sa Rama” is a political move that may serve his domestic positioning but does not advance the legitimacy argument; it instead frames Salianji’s challenge as a third-pole bid, which is a different project than restoring the PD’s internal rule structure.

The case for Salianji’s challenge as a structural pressure point is also real. The membership refresh produced a roll smaller than the 2021 figure by approximately one third. The candidate criteria were published 24 hours before deadline. Five declared candidates were removed; none received a substantive hearing of their appeals before the vote. The EPP has not, as of this writing, recognised the result. These are the elements of a legitimacy contest that does not require Salianji to win electorally; it requires him to keep the procedural questions in front of the European partners whose continued comfort the PD’s international position depends on. He stated on Tuesday that his action will continue, with meetings in Tirana beginning this week. The volume and substance of those meetings will determine whether the contest persists or dissipates.

What the rerun has produced, beneath the official figures and the contested ones, is a PD whose chairman has consolidated formal control at the cost of the informal authority that comes from competition survived. Berisha is now the chairman of a party that did not produce a candidate against him. That is the structural finding, and his coming negotiations with Brussels, with Washington, and with the Albanian electorate will be read against it.