Disagreements on governing Democratic Party election

TIRANA, Dec. 21 – Aleksander Biberaj, a former top leader in the governing Democratic Party of Prime Minister Sali Berisha, loudly criticized the last convention of his party where he was not elected to any political insitution following his disagreements with top leaders earlier this year.
The party convention last week re-elected Berisha as the leader and also some 100 officials to be part of the party’s leadership.
Biberaj was not re-elected.
Biberaj said that the counting process lacked transparency and accused it of manipualtion in the process.
He said that the governing Democratic Party missed the chance to become truly democratic.
It seemed that such criticism came from the opposition’s mouth, which said that Sali Berisha, a former communist during the communist dictatorship through 1990, rose quickly through the party ranks and became a “trusted” agent of the communist party, who would later serve as the personal medical doctor of a top communist leader.
But there are few opposing voices in the Democratic Party, Biberaj one of them.
Berisha was the only candidate. Berisha received 1,204 votes out of the total of 1,214 delegates, which translates to 99.2 percent of the vote. There were only five votes against him.
A controversial figure, Berisha was at a time considered as the country’s first non-communist president, as a reformer who would liberalize the economy and reform Albania’s institutions. But soon, he was accused of authoritarianism, of electoral irregularities, and of instigating violence in an attempt to maintain his party’s grip on power in 1997.
In 1998, Berisha was accused of attempting a coup, following the assassination of the Democratic politician Azem Hajdari and the protests by his supporters.
Berisha is believed to have no dissenting voices in is party. During the last four years he has been in power the opposition has accused him of being involved in illegal arms dealings, corruption, usurping the freedom of the press, controlling the judiciary and threatening judicial independence.
This year he was reelected and preserved his power, though with the help of a smaller leftist political party, the Socialist Movement for Integration of Ilir Meta, now Berisha’s deputy and also foreign minister.