GENERAL elections in Albania were plunged into chaos yesterday after five opposition parties withdrew while voting was still going on, accusing the ruling conservatives of intimidation.
The parties, including the former communist Socialist Party, the chief rival to President Sali Berisha's Democratic Party, demanded the election be annulled and a new one be held in its place in democratic conditions".
The move came as the ruling Democrats confidently predicted they would sweep to victory in Albania's third elections since the fall in 1990 of a repressive Stalinist regime that made this Balkan state the poorest and most isolated in Europe.
In a statement, the Socialist and four allied parties accused Mr Berisha's government of creating "a climate of terror, psychological pressure and physical violence" before and on elections day. They said hundreds of Socialist Party members and supporters had been "mistreated, harassed, threatened and detained". Two were wounded by gunfire yesterday in the southern town of Vlora, party officials said.
In other irregularities, they charged, opposition representatives were prevented from taking their seats on election monitoring panels. And ballot boxes were sealed with no opposition members present, the Socialist spokesman, Mr Kastriot Islami, said.
"We will not recognise the results of this election even if the Socialist Party ends up winning," he said.
The opposition parties urged international organisations and the Council of Europe to make the government behave as expected of a council member.
Some of the 400 international observers yesterday expressed reservations about how the election was conducted.
Earlier, the Democrats had brandished an exit poll crediting them with 59 per cent of the vote, while the electoral commission, spokesman, Mr Gene Bektashi, forecast a 33 per cent vote for the Socialists. Turnout at 4.00 p.m. was put at higher than 50 per cent. But the ballot was marred by several incidents, including a knife attack, as opposition groups, claimed their supporters had been arrested and intimidated.
In Tropoja in north west Albania, a ruling party official chairing a local commission supervising the vote was attacked with a knife, the electoral commission said. A Socialist Party official was found with 700 fake copies of electoral registers in Vlora, in the south, prompting Berisha to delay the closing time for polling stations by two hours to allow new copies of registers to be distributed.
Socialists and their ally the Democratic Alliance in an intellectual offshoot of the ruling party said at least 10 of their members had been arrested "with the obvious aim of intimidating electors".
The country's 2.2 million registered electors, from a population a million higher than that, were choosing 140 deputies to parliament.
"It's an historic day, which is going to mark the end a period of difficult transition on the road to Albania's integration in Europe," the president and party leader said. He was warmly applauded when he went to cast his vote at 9.30 a.m. together with his wife Liri.
The Democrats recalled the repression of the communist era, and raised the spectre of a communist comeback. The Socialists criticised the "dictatorship" of the Democrats and warned that Mr Berisha could try to become a new strongman".