In a meeting with local elected officials, mayors and municipal councilors of the Democratic Party, former Prime Minister Sali Berisha stated that the party he leads has corrected the fatal mistake it made with the 2019 local elections.
Sali Berisha: The DP corrected the fatal mistake it made with the 2019 local elections, but on the other hand, the DP accomplished or achieved the unimaginable. In what sense? In the truest sense of the word. In the elections of May 14, 2023, we entered the elections without a seal, without a flag, without the name of the mayor on the ballot, without a single penny of funding. Without our representatives in half of the counting commissions. And we as the opposition received 600 thousand votes, hundreds of thousands of councilors. We also won some of the country's municipalities. So, the elections that were predicted to be the final elimination of the opposition as an electoral factor, in fact the Albanians proved the opposite. It is very difficult, despite the government's deceptive propaganda, but I tell you that it is very difficult to find such a case in history, where a political force, deprived of all this, achieves a result that we achieved on May 14. At a time when the narco-government used every kind of mechanism, used the criminal electoral state and its gangs, used deceptive propaganda, all of this, but over 600 thousand Albanian voters voted against it.
During his speech, Berisha says that the May 2023 elections were predicted to bring the elimination of the opposition, but adds that the Albanians proved the opposite. Further, the chief democrat expresses his conviction that in the May 11, 2025 elections, the DP together with the opposition forces will achieve a deep and deserved victory.
Sali Berisha: I pause in this analysis first to express my deepest conviction that today the political force, which in those conditions, added to the deepest, most undeserved isolation, managed to get 600 thousand votes from Albanians, will be a political force of a profound victory in these elections. A deserved victory. There was nothing more impossible than in conditions of total discrimination, of a true bandit terror, of a criminal electoral state, of the most brutal acts, with lists, with gangs, with patronageists, with activists, etc., to be voted for by 600 thousand Albanians. In the electoral history of this country, it will remain the electoral surprise of the DP and the opposition.