Ilir Meta
Ilir Meta was prime minister of Albania from 1999 to 2002 and president from 2017 to 2022. He was the Socialist who took the government at thirty, after Majko, in the year of the Kosovo war. He quarrelled with Nano so bitterly that he left the party in 2004 and founded the Socialist Movement for Integration. It held the balance in every parliament for fifteen years. It put him in coalition with Berisha in 2009 and with Rama in 2013. The premiership was the years of the refugees going home, the stabilisation talks with Brussels opened, the growth of seven per cent, and the election of 2001 won and contested. There was the quarrel. Nano wanted the office back and got it. Meta went as deputy prime minister and then out. The presidency, to which the parliament elected him in April 2017 in the deal that let the election go ahead, was five years of war with Rama. He refused to sign the justice reform's vetting laws. He cancelled the local elections of June 2019, which Rama held anyway. He was impeached by Rama's parliament in June 2021 for violating the constitution, by a hundred and four votes to seven. The constitutional court found in February 2022 that the violations were not serious enough and he served out his term. He was born in Skrapar, the son of a bus driver. He studied economics at Tirana, and was in the student movement of December 1990 that brought the party's rule down. He sat in parliament from 1992 and was the Socialists' youngest minister at twenty-eight. The corruption case followed him. A video of 2011 in which he appeared to discuss a bribe over a hydroelectric contract with his own economy minister was found by the supreme court in 2012 to prove nothing. The American State Department barred him and his family from the United States in 2022 for significant corruption. He was arrested in October 2024 on the road from Tirana, dragged from his car by the special prosecutor's men on charges of laundering and false declaration. He is in custody while the case, which he calls Rama's, is heard. His party is still in parliament, under his ex-wife.
- Lived: 1969 CE – ?
- Nationality: Albanian
- Roles: prime minister, president, politician
