Basha wins key Tirana mayoral election

TIRANA, May 23 – Albanian electoral officials on Monday declared that the governing party’s candidate has won the mayoral race for the capital, Tirana. The Central Election Commission announced late Monday that former Interior Minister, Lulzim Basha, received 81 votes more than Edi Rama– the leader of the opposition and current mayor. The announcement followed the commission’s decision to validate votes cast in the wrong ballot boxes in the May 8 elections, after a first count gave Rama a 10-vote victory. Rama has threatened not to recognize the result, and Socialist supporters have held daily protests outside the electoral commission offices. The opposition has already appealed to the country’s top legal electoral institution, the Electoral College, to declare the decision to include ballots cast in the wrong boxes in the final tally, invalid. Albania has been gripped by a political crisis for almost two years, with the opposition accusing the governing Democrats of corruption and rigging the national elections in 2009. Four opposition supporters were shot dead in clashes with police in January. The government has denied any manipulation of votes. The campaign for the local elections was marred by violence, including bomb attacks on opposition candidates. For six days, hundreds of opposition supporters demonstrated in front of the CEC over its decision to include miscast votes in the final count for the Tirana mayoral election. Though outraged Rama supporters vowed to remain outside the commission’s building for days in an anti-government protest, the unrest halted the day after Basha’s victory was declared. However the dispute will only deepen the political crisis that has gripped Albania for almost two years. The European Union and the United States have called for calm. In a statement late Thursday, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon urged Albanian politicians to “focus on constructive engagement actions befitting a future member of the European Union and not on negative rhetoric or actions, which serve only to denigrate the process.” According to official results, Democrat Lulzim Basha defeated the Socialist opposition leader and incumbent Edi Rama by 81 votes out of the 250,885 cast in Tirana. Basha got 124,786, Rama 124,705 and a third candidate, Hysni Milloshi, a communist, received 1,394 votes. These results have come after two weeks of withholding the final result and controversially adding miscast ballots. The Socialists accused the authorities of electoral fraud and lodged a formal complaint about the result– but the decision is unlikely to be overturned. The outcome is certain to add to tensions, already running high in Albania, which has been in a deep political crisis since Berisha won the parliamentary election two years ago. The latest elections were a crucial gauge of Albania’s readiness to advance further towards European Union membership. Several top Brussels officials already voiced concern over developments in the Balkan country and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso cancelled a visit to Tirana last week.