Albania’s artist-turned-prime minister Edi Rama, who has secured his fourth term in office in parliamentary elections at the weekend, has vowed to integrate the Balkan nation into the European Union.
His leftist Socialist Party won more than 52 percent of the vote on Sunday, giving Rama his fourth term, official results showed late Tuesday.
Rama, a former basketball player who went to art school in Paris, has pledged to “guarantee Albania’s entry into the EU by 2030”.
“With the European passport, Europe becomes as small as Albania and Albania becomes as big as Europe”, the 60-year-old prime minister has repeatedly said.
Albania opened EU membership talks in 2022. In the meantime, Donald Trump has been re-elected US president, which Rama said “may be a great opportunity to do things differently for us and for the world”.
It is an “opportunity to see Europe itself a little differently because Europe is ageing”, he said.
Born in 1964 in the capital Tirana, the son of a sculptor and a doctor has repeatedly hailed the EU as a “project of peace and prosperity” that could help keep peace in the volatile Balkans.
In 2014, Rama was the first Albanian leader to visit the Serbian capital Belgrade in almost seven decades of frosty relations — not least over the war in Kosovo, mainly the home of ethnic Albanians.
More recently, he signed a deal with his far-right Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni in 2023 to open two Italian-run centres in Albania to house migrants seeking to enter the EU.
The controversial move is part of her efforts to outsource migrant processing to a non-EU country and speed up repatriations of failed asylum seekers.
Despite being opposites on the political spectrum, Rama and Meloni have developed close ties given their countries’ economic trade and the large Albanian diaspora in Italy.
– Bitter rivalry –
Rama entered Albanian politics in the late 1980s, just before the fall of communism in what was then one of the world’s most isolated countries.
His ambition was to modernise the country to bring it closer to Europe.
In 2005 he took the helm of the Socialist Party, in the middle of his 11-year-stint as mayor of the capital Tirana, after earlier serving as the nation’s culture minister.
Rama has a long-running and bitter rivalry with the ex-leader of the right-wing Democratic Party, Sali Berisha, the previous prime minister and a former president.
Their enmity deepened in 2009 when Rama claimed that an election he lost to Berisha was neither free nor fair.
Socialist supporters took to the streets for months of anti-government protests, during which four people were killed in clashes with police.
Rama, a casual dresser who regularly sports a three-day beard, has voiced a desire to make Albania a “modern state ruled by law”.
In mid-2016, he initiated an overhaul of the country’s justice system, strongly supported by the EU and aimed at fighting corruption and strengthening the rule of law.
Rama has regularly been accused by his opponents of links with organised crime, but he has vowed to withdraw from political life if anyone proved it.
– Keen artist –
Rama is also still a keen artist, hanging many of his works on the walls of his office and holding occasional international exhibitions.
As mayor of Tirana from 2000 to 2011, he set out to transform the impoverished capital into a lively modern city, sprucing up drab communist facades with brightly coloured paint.
The initiative won him awards and praise from the Western media, even though the renovation concerned only a few streets in the centre of a city struggling with galloping and chaotic urbanisation.
As prime minister, Rama returned to his passion for supporting major construction projects by top architects.
An active social networks user, where he posts both private moments and photos of his meetings with other top officials, the multilingual Rama has also made art an instrument of political communication.
“I had other projects” than politics, he once said, adding that being at the government’s helm is one of the “greatest possible honours”.
“I’m an artist who makes the prime minister of Albania”.
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