My analysis of the Albanian parliamentary election of 2021

 The Albanian parliamentary election of 2021, which took place last week, threw up an interesting surprise in that the incumbent Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama, and his Socialist Party of Albania (PS) were re-elected with the same number of seats as before, 74, giving him once again a majority of 8 in the new Albanian parliament, although PS did not quite achieve a majority of votes cast (48.68%, still a high figure by the standards of countries using proportional representation in their elections).

However, PS' support was shored up by the near-collapse of the Socialist Movement for Integration (LSI) which was nearly wiped out. It was reduced to 4 seats and 6.81% of the vote, and half of its remaining seats are in the Albanian capital, Tirana. This happened despite the fact it was in opposition to PS at the time and the fact that its founder, Ilir Meta, is the current President of Albania. Some of its support went to the Social Democratic Party of Albania, which has European integration and obtaining of EU membership for Albania as a key platform; that party won 3 seats. The main conservative opposition in Albania, the Democratic Party-United for Change Alliance, won 59 seats for an increase of 13, and its increased support in Tirana proved crucial to that advance, for it once again only topped the poll in the northernmost, mountainous and agricultural counties of Albania, which include some of Albania's poorest regions (e.g. Kukes). 

Even though Albania elects its MPs via 12 counties with open-list proportional representation and a national threshold of just 1%, no parties other than the four aforementioned parties/alliances won any seats. Nisma Thurje, aka the Hashtag Initiative, a centrist anti-corruption movement, came closest with 0.65%, but only in Elbasan did it poll more than 1%. It polled badly in rural counties even though corruption is usually worst there.

Turnout once again was poor, with only 46.29% of registered Albanian voters voting. Despite the controversy that has surrounded Mr Rama, especially with his regard towards free speech and the media, he is set to continue as PM of Albania without any problems. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The English local elections of 2023-Conservatives pay the penalty for failing to put a stop to sleaze and sewage in our rivers

The English local elections of 2023 (Northern Ireland's elections will finish next week and a separate blog post will be devoted to these) not only resulted in more than 1000 Conservative losses just as Rallings & Thrasher and Sir John Curtice predicted, they also resulted in sweeping Green and Liberal Democrat gains across the nation-sending a hard message to the Conservatives about the need to protect our environment and Labour for barely acting like an opposition at all. The Conservatives in total made a net loss of 1,061 seats, with the vast majority being in the shire districts where they once dominated-even councils such as Bracknell Forest and Surrey Heath, which they held in 1995 and 2019, fell, to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively in those two cases. Who they lost to varied widely by the nature of the authority-their losses to Labour came mainly in (ex) industrial "Red Wall" areas where they had made against-the-trend gains in 2019 or fared better
Read more

My analysis of the Swedish general election of 2022

The Swedish general election of 2022 generated some surprising results, despite also averting pollsters' predictions significantly. The last three years in particular proved to be a rough ride for the Social Democrat led governments of Stefan Lofven and Magdalena Andersson respectively. Although Sweden's laxer approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (compared to most countries in Europe, which imposed lockdowns during much of 2020 and 2021, an approach that arguably caused more problems than it solved) proved effective, Mr Lofven's desire to lift the austerity tax (which only affected a wealthy minority, similar in nature to the wealth tax initiative of former French President Francois Hollande) and to join NATO proved contentious, with two of the Social Democrats' former coalition partners (the Swedish Greens and Swedish Left Party, who had both pulled out of confidence and supply) unsurprisingly voting against Swedish accession to NATO membership (all other parties in the R
Read more

On the 2020 Serbian election: Why a boycott will only worsen things there

First of all, I apologise for the recent hiatus; however elections are still postponed or on hold in many countries, including the UK. Serbia, however, was able to proceed with its 2020 general election amidst this crisis. Its overall result proved reminiscent of Hungarian elections under Viktor Orban's tenure (2010-present), since the leading national-conservative coalition, the SNS (Progressive Party of Serbia) coalition led by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic (Ana Brnabic is the Serbian Prime Minister, and the first woman and openly homosexual person to hold that position), polled 61.6% of the vote, giving them as many as 191 seats out of 250 and a majority of as high as 132, almost unheard of in any country with proportional representation. Press freedom has endured significant curbs since President Vucic first came into power as Serbian PM in 2012 (he became President of Serbia in 2017), as have civil liberties of Serbs in general. Nepotism and corruption in the Serbian
Read more