On April 25th Albania will hold general elections and due to a series of failures, corruption, scandals, high level of poverty, and back steps which resulted in 15 harsh conditions for the opening of the negotiations, Albania is at the brink of change of power.
Edi Rama will try to be re-elected although analysts believe that the corruption and the slow progress in the European Union integration negotiations will make the Albanian prime minister fight hard to stay on power.
The latest scandal concerns the use of the personal electronic data, E-Albania, a government portal that holds private and protected data on every citizen of Albania. The data was allegedly given to Edi Rama’s party and therefore each citizen was assigned a party member patronage. In the disclosure of this scandal the notes of the patronage individuals involved racist statements and even plans for isolating certain voters by keeping them by force on election day.
Only a few days from elections, Edi Rama’s government imposes 14-day quarantine on Albanian citizens living in Greece and intending to travel to their homelands, an action interpreted as an attempt to discourage those wishing to exercise their right to vote.
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The relevant exclusive article by protothema.gr made a huge impression in Albania, as the fear of many independent international organizations about the fairness of the upcoming general elections in the country seems to be justified.
The elections will also be an opportunity for the Greek ethnic minority of the country to express their feelings, especially after the murder of Konstantinos Katsifas in 2018 and the incidents of Himara, where members of the minority had their houses confiscated and demolished without due warning.