Democratic Party to Launch Process to Elect MP Candidates

Opposition Democratic Party will start preparing for the 2021 elections by launching the process to elect candidates to members of parliament.

The decision was taken during a PD leadership meeting on Sunday. The process will take place during summer.

In 2017, PD leader Lulzim Basha announced the party would implement the “one member one vote” method in electing MP candidates. However, the process was halted after the party entered a long protest period, which resulted in an agreement between Basha and Prime Minister Edi Rama that led to a caretaker government.

In July 2017, during his election campaign for the PD leadership, Basha promised that MP candidates would be elected by party members, not by the party leader anymore.

“As I said when I submitted the list of MP [candidates], this will be the last time that the list is submitted by the [party] leader. From now on, it will be the product of a transparent, comprehensive, standardized, and competitive process to identify with the vote of each member of the Democratic Party the best [candidates] and to unite around them in [electoral] battle,” Basha told supporters in 2017.