Republican Party of Albania - History

History

The party was founded in January 1991 under the leadership of the writer Sabri Godo, who was also its first chairman. After the Democratic Party, it was the second party to be founded in Albania after the anti-communist revolution in the autumn of 1990. The Republicans chose the American Republican Party as their political role model. They arranged themselves as right of center on the political spectrum, slightly more right-wing than the Democratic Party of Albania.

In the 1992 elections the party received 2.9% of the national vote and won a single seat. They joined a coalition with the Democratic Party, but had little influence on the policies being shaped. The 1996 elections saw the party almost double its share of the vote to 5.9%, winning three seats. After the 1997 uprising, in which the centre-right coalition was overthrown by socialist supporters, the party became an opposition party. In the 1997 elections the party was reduced to a single seat.

Before the 2001 elections, the party joined the Union for Victory Coalition under the leadership of the Democratic Party, which won 46 seats. In the 2005 elections the party received 20% of the vote in the national voting for the proportional seats, putting it in first place. Although it won 11 proportional seats, it failed to win a single constituency seat, resulting in the party only being the third largest in Parliament. For the 2009 elections the party was part of the "Alliance for Changes" coalition. However, it was reduced to a single seat, after seeing its vote share fall to just 2.1% of the national total. In the 2011 local elections the party won a total of 67,039 votes throughout the country, twice the amount they had received in the Albanian parliamentary election, 2009.