Parliamentary Elections, 11 May 2025

Albania held elections on 11 May 2025 for all 140 parliamentary seats. Legislative elections happen every four years and members are voted in through a regional proportional and multi-member system in 12 constituencies (IFES n.d.). The electoral management body of Albania is the Central Electoral Commission (CEC), headed by the State Election Commissioner and involves three other leading units—the Regulatory Commission, Commission of Sanctions and Complaints, and Deputy State Election Commissioner (CEC n.d.). 

The information environment in Albania is hampered by the concentration of the ownership of media companies, lack of access to government officials, verbal and physical assaults on journalists, and self-censorship. The majority of media outlets are perceived to be aligned to the ruling party (OSCE/ODIHR 2025). Women were especially targeted, with an alarming number of female Members of Parliament and political and civil society activists being subject to coordinated misogynistic attacks, sexualized insults, delegitimization campaigns, and threats on social and traditional media (WFD 2025).   

The CEC paused the count of ballots from Greece (for more on overseas voting see Innovations, below) after a request from the opposition party citing lack of proper identification on many ballots from the country and allegations of ballots with the same penmanship and style of writing. There were also allegations of improper handling of ballots by unauthorized individuals and ballots arriving after the deadline from Greece (Top Channel.tv 2025; A2 CNN 2025). All 53,000 ballots from Greece were put aside (Albanian Times 2025; Shqiptarja.com 2025b). As part of its complaint, the opposition party asked for overseas votes not to be counted until an independent audit could be done (Bold News 2025). 

During election day, most polling stations conducted voting without incident, but seven people were arrested for photographing their ballots (Shqiptarja.com 2025a). In the region of Vlora, 55 polling stations were blocked off due to road closures from the Giro d’Italia bike tour taking place in the area on election day. The roads were closed for competition from 10:30 to 18:00. The ruling party wanted to extend the voting hours to 22:00, but the opposition party disagreed— ultimately a decision could not be made due to opposition members walking out of the meeting and not voting on the issue (Shqiptarja.com 2025a). 

Multiple instances of vote buying were reported and the CEC investigated 37 of these; many cases involved alleged connections between political parties and organized crime and in some cases, intimidation and threats to voters. There were 166 complaints to the CEC alleging use of public resources in the campaign (OSCE/ODIHR 2025). There were five observed  incidences of inference with the voting process, unauthorized interactions with voters and the presence of unauthorized people at polling stations. All of these were later reported to the CEC (OSCE/ODIHR 2025). 

Turnout was 43.28 per cent, three per cent lower than in the previous elections (46.32 per cent in 2021) and the lowest since transition to democracy in 1991 (International IDEA n.d.). 

The ruling Socialist Party of Albania (Partia Socialiste e Shqipërisë) won 53.27 per cent of the vote and the main opposition party, The Alliance for Greater Albania (Koalicioni Partia Demokratike - Aleanca për Shqipërinë Madhështore) won 32.93 per cent; other small partes won up to four per cent of the vote individually (CEC 2025). International observers waited for some hours for the election result as broadcasters did not release exit poll data (Hajdari 2025).

Innovations

Electoral reforms passed in July 2024 allowed Albanians residing outside the country to vote via postal voting, and this election was the first to implement this voting channel. The registration period was from early January 2025 to early March 2025. 294,155 citizens abroad registered to vote, the majority residing in Italy, Germany and Greece. The CEC produced videos to help with registration and how to vote properly. Once approved, registered voters were sent a ballot via post to fill out and return (IFES n.d.). Some 41,000 applications had to be rejected, due to a lack of appropriate proof of residence in the host country (OSCE/ODIHR 2025). 

Albania is continuing to introduce technology in elections through the use of biometric identification of voters and with electronic voting pilots. Also new in these elections was the modified electoral system (OSCE/ODIHR 2025).