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La long time THE Europe’s darkest and most warlike part, the Balkans could have a new leader. The most unusual thing is that it is the Albanian Prime Minister, a 58-year-old former basketball player and modern artist, Edi Rama. Last month, his Socialist Party beat opposition groups to the ground to win almost all of the country’s 61 town halls and municipal councils. It is therefore likely that he will win the next general elections, scheduled for 2025, his fourth consecutive victory, and will thus rule until 2029 what was once the most miserable outpost in the region. In power since 2013, Mr. Rama is already the longest-serving current head of a Balkan government. In 2000, he became dynamic and colorful mayor of Tirana, the Albanian capital. Since 2005, he has led his party. He can now boast of being a star of the Balkans, even a calming influence in a still fragile region: as evidenced by the Ructions next door in Kosovo, where the Serbian minority attacks the ethnic Albanian majority. Mr Rama refuses to anger his cousins and urges the West to treat Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, sensitively.
Slouching in his office after returning from talks with Manchester City football club about creating a network of coaching academies in the Balkans, he cuts an imposing figure in a T-shiny white shirt, pants and sneakers. He’s six feet seven inches tall, with a shaved head, a well-trimmed white beard, a speckled mustache, and watchful, sinister eyes: you might not want to pass him in a dark alley at midnight. Fluent in many languages, he is clearly cosmopolitan, despite an upbringing in what was one of the most isolated, vicious and paranoid countries in the world, often described by modern-day Albanians as “the Europe’s North Korea” before the collapse of communism in 1991.
“Italy was our America,” he muses. “TV, Italian football, the Pope, music. But even get TV was not easy. » He remembers draping his room with sheets and rugs so no one could hear him and his friends playing bootleg Beatles recordings. He says he remembers his shock and joy when he was able to read Kafka, Proust and Dostoyevsky, listen to Ravel, Debussy and Stravinsky and see Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso. His detractors point out that he was a child of the communist regime. nomenclature; his father was a leading official sculptor, who may have shaped Stalin’s features. Mr. Rama is also accused of engaging in a cult of personality. One Western observer calls him “brilliant, visionary, eccentric, self-centered… with a strong sense of his legacy in history.”
He does not hesitate to list his achievements – or at least those of post-communist Albania. Tirana is unrecognizable from what it was thirty years ago: a sinister, gray, totalitarian, sub-Soviet Ruritanian village. At the time, the entire country had about 6,000 cars: it was illegal to own one. Today, it has more than 700,000. Although Mr. Rama’s party is descended from the one led for 44 years by mass murderer Enver Hoxha until his death in 1985, it has been completely overhauled to become a pro-market social democratic party. His detractors accuse him of rooting corruption under an oligarchic elite that dominates the media and has allowed inequalities to widen.
Mr. Rama ignores such claims. He says his party is inspired by British New Labour. Tony Blair, his lawyer wife Cherie, and his long-time image specialist Alastair Campbell still visit to give advice. “We are not very ideological,” believes Mr. Rama. “For us, there is no right or left solution: it is not heresy to have a good solution that works.” Margaret Thatcher, he argues, was “a great leader” who implemented painful reforms to modernize Britain, without which New Labor could not have succeeded in its wake.
Mr. Rama’s confidence extends to the region. The whole of the Balkans, he notes, even traditionally Pro-Russian Serbia, is united behind Ukraine. A member of NATO Since 2009 and since 2010, being part of the Schengen group which grants visa-free travel to Europe for up to three months, Albania has no serious conflicts with its neighbors, he adds. “It’s unique in our history.”
As for actually joining the EU, he wisely refuses to suspend dates, while accepting the conditions of entry of the club as a driving force of Albanian reforms. Mr. Rama acknowledges that a number of club countries, led by France, are reluctant to let the Balkan group enter. The mantra of every Western diplomat in Tirana is that Albania is “going in the right direction,” but “there is still much to do.” a long way to go”, particularly with regard to cleaning up the courts and creating a true rule of law, an issue on which the EU and America devotes a lot of attention and money to it. A plan to control all of the country’s judges and prosecutors has led to the dismissal of two-thirds of them. What happens to those who are eliminated? “Oh, they become lawyers and accountants,” says a local civil society activist.
Endemic corruption remains the biggest stain on Albania today. The two main parties are considered responsible, in the eyes of most Albanians. The most charitable view of a diplomat, assessing Mr. Rama’s failure to erase it, is that “to continue development, one only needs to play the game of patronage.”
Please don’t go
The other big problem that bothers Mr. Rama is emigration. The population has fallen by at least a quarter since the end of communism, reaching around 2.9 million today. Albanians continue to leave in droves. Mr Rama is understandably irritable when asked about the widespread view in the West that too many Albanians, including those arriving in Britain illegally by boat, are involved in crime.
But what he deplores most seriously is the persistent lack of civility in his country’s politics. All parties invariably denounce themselves as gangsters, crooks, even killers, which is true in some cases. This, he concedes, dates back to the horrible Hoxha era, when the slightest dissent often meant banishment, jail or even prison. execution. If Albania is ever to become a liberal democracy, this must change, Mr. Rama admits. If that happened, it would be his greatest legacy. It may take another generation. ■
Read more from Charlemagne, our columnist on European politics:
Bakhmut and the spirit of Verdun (June 1st)
Europe lifts Putin’s gas embargo (May 25)
Meet the left-wing Europeans who want to shrink the economy (May 18)
Also: How did the Charlemagne column to his name