Sali Berisha
Sali Berisha was the cardiologist who led Albania's Democratic Party out of the collapse of Europe's last Stalinist regime, its first post-communist president from 1992 to 1997, when the pyramid schemes that had taken the savings of two-thirds of the population collapsed and the country rose against him, looted the army's depots of a million rifles and forced him out after an election under foreign guard, and then its prime minister from 2005 to 2013, the years of NATO membership and the beginning of the European Union application. He has led the opposition since, was declared persona non grata by the United States in 2021 for corruption, and was put under house arrest in 2023. He was born in 1944 in the northern district of Tropoja, studied medicine in Tirana and Paris, was Enver Hoxha's cardiologist and a party member, and in December 1990 became the leader of the students and intellectuals who had founded the first opposition party, which won the election of March 1992 and made him president in April. The first years were the opening: private property, the small farms, the emigration of a fifth of the population to Greece and Italy, growth from nothing, and a state that could not collect taxes and did not try. Meanwhile the investment funds paying fifty per cent a month took the money the emigrants sent home. They failed in January 1997. The south rose, Vlora and Gjirokaster fell to armed committees, the army dissolved, two thousand people died, and an Italian-led force landed in April to hold the ports while the Socialists won the election of June. He resigned in July. He rebuilt the party in opposition, led the protests of 1998 that briefly took the parliament building, and won in 2005 on a promise of clean hands, which the years in office did not keep. There was the Gerdec explosion of 2008 that killed twenty-six people dismantling ammunition his government had sold, and the killing of four demonstrators by the Republican Guard in January 2011. Albania joined NATO in April 2009. He lost to Edi Rama in 2013, was expelled from his own party's parliamentary group in 2021 after the American designation, took the party back in the courts, and was arrested in October 2023 over the privatisation of a Tirana sports complex to his son-in-law.
- Lived: 1944 CE – ?
- Nationality: Albanian
- Roles: president, prime minister, politician, physician
