Albania seeks peaceful polls

TIRANA: Albania votes in parliamentary elections on Sunday with hopes that a long tradition of polling fraud, violence and disputed results will come to an end and propel the country towards EU membership.

The Socialist Party of Prime Minister Edi Rama, 52, appears to have just a slight advantage over the centre-right Democratic Party of Lulzim Basha, 43, according to opinion polls. After a 2009 election, the Rama-led Socialist opposition cried fraud and urged supporters onto the streets for months of protests. Three were shot dead in 2011.

When power changed hands in 2013, the right accepted defeat but engaged in a strategy of obstruction and boycotting the work of the 140-seat parliament, where insults have been exchanged since.

Although Basha, an admirer of US President Donald Trump, has officially led the Democrats for four years, his predecessor Sali Berisha, a former Albanian president and premier, remains a powerful and unifying figure on the right.