Edi Rama
Edi Rama has been prime minister of Albania since 2013, the painter and basketball player who was mayor of Tirana for eleven years and had its grey communist apartment blocks painted in stripes and blocks of orange, green and violet, which was the beginning of his politics and the image of the country's change, and who has won four elections in a row, in 2013, 2017, 2021 and 2025, on the promise of Europe, opening the EU accession negotiations in 2022 and promising membership by 2030, while the opposition calls him a narco-state's manager and the courts he set up with EU help have jailed his former ministers and, in 2024, the mayor of Tirana. He was born in 1964, the son of a sculptor who made the regime's monuments, played for the national basketball team, taught at the academy of arts, and left for Paris in 1994 to paint. He came home in 1998 as minister of culture after his father's funeral and was beaten in the street by unknown men shortly after. Elected mayor in 2000, he cleared the illegal kiosks from the Lana river, painted the facades, and was named world mayor in 2004. He took the Socialist Party's leadership in 2005 after Nano's defeat and lost two elections to Berisha before winning in 2013 by a landslide. The government's first terms were the judicial reform of 2016 demanded by Brussels, which vetted every judge and prosecutor and removed half of them, the pension and energy reforms, the earthquake of 2019 and the pandemic. The opposition boycotted parliament for a year in 2019 and set fire to things. He put the country's police under a British-trained special prosecution and the cannabis fields of Lazarat were cleared, while the traffickers moved to cocaine and the ports. Abroad he has been the Balkan leader the Europeans like, the host of the Berlin Process, the man who offered to take Afghan refugees in 2021 and Italian asylum seekers in 2023 under a deal with Meloni, and the only European prime minister who paints in his office during meetings. His fourth term, won in May 2025 with fifty-two per cent, was the first in which the diaspora voted, and he greeted the result with a promise of an AI minister, which he then appointed.
- Lived: 1964 CE – ?
- Nationality: Albanian
- Roles: prime minister, politician, painter
