Fatos Nano
Fatos Nano was prime minister of Albania three times, for five months in 1991, from 1997 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2005. He was the economist who turned Hoxha's Party of Labour into the Socialist Party in June 1991 and led it for fourteen years. He was Berisha's opposite for the whole of the country's first democratic decade, and the man who governed the wreck the pyramid schemes left. The first premiership was Alia's. It was the government of February 1991 that the first free election confirmed and the general strike brought down in June. The jail was Berisha's, four years from 1993 on a charge of misappropriating Italian food aid that the Council of Europe called political. He was freed from it by the crowds in March 1997 when the state dissolved. The schemes had taken the savings of a third of the population and the south had risen with the army's rifles. The second premiership followed the election of June 1997, held under Italian soldiers, which the Socialists won by two to one. The schemes were wound up, the rifles partly collected, the constitution of 1998 approved by referendum over Berisha's boycott. There were the Kosovo refugees, four hundred and fifty thousand of them, taken in from the spring of 1999, and the murder of Berisha's deputy Azem Hajdari in September 1998. Berisha's supporters stormed the prime minister's office and Nano, who had fled to Macedonia, resigned. The third, from 2002, was the stabilisation and association agreement with the European Union negotiated, and the NATO membership plan. There were the growth of six per cent, the Trans-Adriatic pipeline dreamed of, and the corruption the party's own Rama denounced. That cost him the election of July 2005 to Berisha and the party leadership to Rama two months later. He was born in Tirana, the son of a party official. He studied political economy and was a researcher and a lecturer. He was the party's secretary-general at thirty-eight when Alia needed a face the students would accept. He stood for president in 2007 and got three votes. He founded a movement that got fewer. He lives in Tirana, the man who made the Socialist Party and was made unnecessary by it.
- Lived: 1952 CE – ?
- Nationality: Albanian
- Roles: prime minister, economist, politician
