Albania is no longer a bad Balkan joke

LongTHE T most benighted and quarrelsome part of Europe, the Balkans may have a new leading light. Most unusually he is the prime minister of Albania, a strapping 58-year-old former basketballer cum modern artist, Edi Rama. Last month his Socialist Party trounced the tattered ragbag of opposition groups to win all but a handful of the country’s 61 mayoralties and councils. So he is likely to win the next general election, due in 2025, his fourth victory in a row, and thus to rule until 2029 what was once the region’s most miserable outpost. In power since 2013, Mr Rama is already the longest-serving current head of a Balkan government. In 2000 he emerged as a dynamic and colourful mayor of Albania’s capital, Tirana. Since 2005 he has headed his party. Now he can claim to be a Balkan star, even a calming influence in a still fragile region: witness the, where the Serb minority has been railing against the ethnic Albanian majority. Mr Rama refuses to gee up his cousins, and urges the West to handle Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, sensitively.Sprawled out in his office after flying back from talks with Manchester City Football Club about creating a network of coaching academies in the Balkans, he cuts an imposing figure in a -shirt, slacks and gleaming white sneakers. He is six foot seven inches tall, shaven-headed, with a trim white beard, speckled moustache and watchful, baleful eyes: you might not want to bump into him in a dark alley at midnight. Fluent in an array of languages, he is patently cosmopolitan, despite an upbringing in what was one of the world’s most isolated, vicious and paranoid countries, often described by today’s Albanians as “the North Korea of Europe” before communism collapsed in 1991.