Faced with an unprecedented political challenge, Ali Ahmeti begins to warn about “post-election unrests”

Faced with the failure to prevent the creation of a large opposition Albanian bloc, which greatly reduces its chances of being part of the next Goverment, the DUI party is now playing the ethnic card and warning about unrest after the elections.

DUI leader Ali Ahmeti, who sparked a civil war in Macedonia in 2001 and has doinated the Albanian politics since then (and recently also national politics) said that the country faces a “russian scenario” after the May 8th elections. This is part of Ahmeti’s pre-election strategy to accuse the VMRO-DPMNE party of being close to Russia, which is the main talking point DUI is using in the elections hoping to get support from the Western countries, but the novelty here is the warning about unrest.

We are warning about a Russian scenario aimed toward political unrests after May 8th. Coordinated by VMRO-DPMNE and Mickoski and Apasiev’s Levica, and lacking its own program, the opposition Albanian VLEN coalition is using slander against our officials, even their families, which is concerning. We call on the Albanian and Macedonian opposition to conduct their campaigns in accordance with the European and democratic values, Ahmeti said.

Even though Ahmeti’s comments allege that the opposition is preparing unrests, given his violent past and the extensive corruption allegations that have reduced his support and could lead to criminal investigations, his comments about “unrests after the elections” are widely seen as a threat. Ahmeti was preparing to form a pre-election coalition with SDSM, but the creation of the opposition Albanian bloc stopped this plan and now it seems that SDSM and DUI will run separately in the general elections. Ahmeti today presented what he called a European Coalition, but it only included the minor party of Skender Rexhepi Zejd, a member of Parliament from the Alternative party who sided with DUI as part of Ahmeti’s constant attempts to splinter the opposition Albanian parties. Several other small satellite parties are expected to join DUI but Ahmeti failed to stop his largest rival, the Alliance of Albanians, from joining the opposition bloc and for the first time in decades his position in Albanian politics in Macedonia looks threatened.