FLASH
Shkruar nga Jean-Baptiste Chastand
The French newspaper " Le Monde " has devoted a long article to the closure of "TikTok" by the Albanian government. According to her, this is another maneuver of the Albanian prime minister to attract international attention. Rama himself spoke in the article, as the French media gives strong blows to the government in many cases.
Edi Rama has succeeded with a new media stunt, to talk about Albania in the international arena. On Saturday, December 21, the flamboyant prime minister of the small Balkan country announced that he will close TikTok "for at least a year", after the death of a teenager from Tirana, after a fight started on social networks. This decision is the first in the world to be taken without actually proving that the conflict between young people found its source in the Chinese social network, as it was immediately described as a "dictatorial" action by its opponents.
But that doesn't matter to Mr. Rama, who has led Albania since 2013 and likes to make headlines in the international press with his iconoclastic decisions. For several months, "they are talking about what I have done", said this tall 60-year-old man, during a meeting with the newspaper "Le Monde", at the end of October, when some of his initiatives had already started to attract attention. Like the idea of a Bektashi state in the heart of Tirana or his controversial agreement with Italy to welcome asylum seekers. Or the project to transform an Albanian island into a luxury hotel financed by Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Although all these projects do not necessarily have coherence between them, often evoking criticism or perhaps even never being realized, they have one merit: the gradual erasure of Albania's reputation as a mafia nursery, an image that has stuck to this country of long gangrenated by the traffic in cannabis. " Mafia is an international phenomenon. Such large quantities of drugs pass through the ports of large European countries that they cannot be compared to the GDP of Albania ", says Rama.
He can be quite bitter when this delicate subject is discussed.
On the other hand, he becomes significantly more attractive when he explains how he intends to join his country with the European Union as soon as possible. " Technically, we will be ready [to join the EU] in 2028 ," he assures, while Albania has started membership negotiations in mid-October. In order to complete them as soon as possible, Rama claims that he will rely on Chat GPT, whose technical director was until September, the Albanian engineer Mira Murati.
In addition to being a basketball player, Edi Rama is also a hero of novels ("Zgjerimi" by the Austrian author Robert Menasse, recently translated into Albanian by the publishing house "Dudaj") and an artist exhibited in Paris and New York. Most importantly, he likes to impress: he transformed his offices in the center of Tirana into a brilliant exhibition center while, when he was mayor, he painted the facades of large Soviet-style apartment blocks with motifs and colors of different. His opponents, on the other hand, criticize this son of an artist close to the dictator Enver Hoxha (1908-1985) for having imposed strict control over all the institutions of his country.
However, their criticism has little bearing on his undisputed popularity. Although he presents himself as a social democrat, Mr. Rama can negotiate deals with both Italy's right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and the Trump family. "I don't believe in the right-left division", likes to repeat this leader, who nevertheless has a stable political conviction: his unconditional commitment to the EU. With his fiery speeches about Europe, which he can pronounce in Italian, English or French, a language he learned during his artistic life in Paris in the 1990s, Rama has managed to win hearts in Brussels.
With a leader who never makes nationalist speeches, unlike many of his colleagues in the region, Albania could become a member of the EU by the end of the decade, alongside Montenegro, another model state according to Brussels. " We have never had a high-level official visit from Moscow, our relations with Russia are minimal ", recalls Rama, while Serbia refuses to cut ties with Vladimir Putin. Is this enough to enable Albania's EU membership? "I don't know if the European Council will say yes or no", carefully admits Rama, who knows very well that the enlargement process is also a "very political issue related to the internal dynamics of the Union and the electoral needs of the states member". With a predominantly Muslim population, Albania still remains an obstacle for many European right-wing extremist groups, even though the practice of religion there is very tolerant.
"Infested by criminals"
Despite Mr. Rama's efforts to avoid this topic, the powerful Albanian mafia remains a real concern, especially when it has diversified in recent years into the lucrative transportation of cocaine from Latin America. Many experts think that her money helps finance the real estate boom that is currently being observed in Tirana. "But, is the real estate market in London or New York clean?", answers Rama, who is proud of the deep reform of justice that started in 2017.
This reform is giving the first results, while several Albanian political personalities have been arrested for corruption in recent months. "For the first time in our history, individuals connected to political power, whether left or right, are being prosecuted by justice", boasts the head of the government. "A dozen officials of his party have been involved in cases of corruption or organized crime", said Gjergj Erebara.
"The state is still gangrenous with criminals who are in positions of power and control the police, municipalities and institutions," the journalist recalls.
An MP from Mr Rama's party was arrested in October for using SKY ECC, the messaging app favored by Balkan mafias, to transmit sensitive criminal information. "I have told my colleagues that each person must answer individually in case of corruption", defends the prime minister, who has a habit of washing his hands of the judicial fate of his people. In this context, the strategy of continuous media strikes can also be useful to avoid attention from embarrassing files. /Adapted with abbreviations from "Le Monde"
Lini një Përgjigje