On the morning of 20 January 2025, a message arrived on the phone of a local official in a southern Albanian municipality from his superior. “You should take your annual leave; we’ll be engaged in the campaign,” the message instructed.
The employee, who chose to be identified as Alban, requested annual leave a day later, but in reality he did not rest.
Instead of his usual office work, Alban* went out into the field to gather data on voters and their political affiliations to support the Socialist Party’s campaign offices, which had already started up the engines of the campaign for the parliamentary elections of 11 May.
He describes his campaign work as “combing the voter list”.
“Our work was very clear: in the SP electoral offices we filtered all the voter lists. We analysed every name and made the relevant separations, so that on 11 May we were calm about every citizen who turned up at the polling station,” the local official said on condition of anonymity.
He was not the only one.
Data secured by BIRN through the law on the right to information show that thousands of public-administration employees in central and local government took annual leave during the January–April 2025 period — a period that coincides with the on-the-ground electoral campaign for the 11 May parliamentary elections.
Compared with the non-electoral year 2024, the number of annual leaves rose by nearly 40% in most major municipalities and other central institutions — figures that, according to experts, reflect the wide use of public employees in vote gathering.
“State resources have been used continuously, but now this has become normalised, and that is the main concern and the change from elections of the years before 2009,” says Afrim Krasniqi, director of the Tirana-based Institute for Political Studies.
“The impact is statistical in terms of votes and substantive in terms of the quality of politics and parliament,” he added.
The flood of annual leaves
Throughout election years, public-administration employees in Albania simultaneously face and exert pressure to gather votes in favour of the ruling party. According to the OSCE-ODIHR report on the 11 May elections, Prime Minister Edi Rama’s Socialist Party benefited from unfair advantages from the wide use of public resources and from pressure on voters, especially on public-administration employees.
The observation missions also received numerous reports claiming pressure on municipal employees from their superiors to support or take part in the Socialist Party’s campaign. Concerns were also raised about the influence of patronage networks across the country, used as levers to secure votes contrary to international election standards.
To document the involvement of the public administration in the pre-election period, BIRN requested, through the law on the right to information, statistical data from the country’s main ministries and municipalities on the number of annual leaves granted in the January–April 2025 period and compared it with the same period in 2023 and 2024.
Of the 20 central and local institutions that responded to the requests, in the January–April 2025 period, 5,673 employees had taken annual leave, or 40% more than in the same period in 2024. The Municipality of Tirana leads the list with a 30 per cent rise in annual leaves compared with the same period last year, followed by the Ministry of Innovation and Culture and that of the Environment.
The data gathered by BIRN also show that, within institutions, the number of annual leaves granted in the January–April 2025 period varies between 5 per cent and 33 per cent of the staff for certain ministries. Meanwhile, in some municipalities, more than half of the staff were on annual leave in the same period.
The institution with the fewest annual leaves was the Albanian Parliament, while the Prime Minister’s Office refused to provide the data, claiming it does not have these statistics.
The statistics on annual leave confirm the Socialist Party’s involvement in the elections several months before the official campaign; the upward trend begins in January and peaks in February and March 2025. In line with the statistics, public-administration employees told BIRN on condition of anonymity that they had been forced to take annual leave during these periods also because of their engagement with diaspora Albanians.
Gerta Meta, head of the Society for Democratic Culture, told BIRN that the engagement of public-administration employees has the potential to significantly affect the electoral process.
“The use of the administration for the campaign distorts equality between contestants, creates pressure on employees and on voters, and uses state resources for partisan purposes,” Meta told BIRN.
“The impact may have been significant, especially in areas where the public administration has wide contact with the community,” she added.
Patronage of the diaspora
At the start of the electoral campaign, Prime Minister Edi Rama announced as an electoral target the winning of 900,000 votes inside and outside the country. Although it seemed difficult, the maths was simplified by breaking it down by region.
To achieve this objective, the political leaders of the regions cast their eyes on the diaspora from the start of their registration process. To support them, public-administration employees were organised into working groups that travelled mainly to Greece and Italy to engage Albanian émigrés in voting.
Through separate interviews, public-administration officials told BIRN that they had used annual leave for meetings with Albanians in Greece and Italy. To cover their expenses, they declared that they had received excessive fuel vouchers.
“They told me to take annual leave and go to Greece. ‘You need to meet a number of our people there,’ ” recalls Mandi*, another local-government official.
“We went to Greece 3–4 times; for each trip they took 400 litres of fuel vouchers,” he added, emphasising that they sold the fuel vouchers to secure money for the stay.
Another official engaged with the diaspora vote told BIRN on condition of anonymity that he had travelled to Athens, Greece, with voter lists and their contact details, secured by relatives in Albania.
He added that he had stayed for almost 3 weeks in Athens in January of this year, where he had taken part in setting up electoral offices and in meetings with potential voters.
“They set up offices in several areas, and with the contacts given to us by their family members in Albania we managed to find them. We even went to their homes, where we helped them register on the Central Electoral Commission’s platform,” said the official identified as Genti*.
“It was colossal work; we worked from morning until night,” he stressed.
Depoliticising the administration
The politicisation of the public administration and its engagement in filling the granary of votes in favour of the ruling party is considered by election experts to be a key problem requiring an immediate solution.
“Legal and practical instruments are needed for this,” suggests Rigels Xhemollari from the organisation “Qendresa Qytetare”.
According to him, interventions in the electoral legislation are needed to increase sanctions for misuse of public office and to extend the period of bans on the use of public resources during elections.
“OSCE in its recommendations, but also Qendresa Qytetare, have been in sync that these recommendations are two immediate measures that should be taken,” he stressed.
Gerta Meta also agrees that the need for change is urgent and proposes increasing sanctions. But on a wider scale, Meta considers that only the genuine depoliticisation of the public administration will eliminate such phenomena of influence over a free and fair electoral process.
“Genuine depoliticisation of the public administration through merit-based recruitment and not on partisan ties; strengthening of institutional control by the Central Electoral Commission, the Ombudsman and audit bodies, as well as effective protection for whistle-blowers who report political pressure or abuse of duty,” Meta listed for BIRN.
For political analyst Afrim Krasniqi, we are no longer dealing only with a problem of electoral administration, but with a political crisis that affects the country’s democracy. He suggests that Albania does not need to look far afield, but only to follow Kosovo’s example to improve its election standards.
“For example, in Kosovo, if a public-administration official is involved in legal violations, in addition to the financial and criminal measure they lose the right to a career in the profession for several years, that is, they get a direct, measurable and immediate sanction,” Krasniqi said.
He also suggests that, to minimise abuses, legal responsibility needs to extend to the heads of public institutions, since according to Krasniqi it is they who direct the use of state resources, who carry out appointments or dismissals of an electoral nature, or who inflate the administration during election times.
“The heads neither pay nor are sanctioned, which shows that the system is distorted…,” Krasniqi concluded.
