A Blind Eye?: Albanian Leader Rama a Darling of Europe Despite Corruption Back Home

He is being passed around Europe these days almost like a trophy.

At the January retreat of the Christian Social Democrats (CSU), the center-right party in Bavaria, he was the star guest – Edi Rama, head of the Socialist Party of Albania. In 1991, the party inherited the legacy of reactionary communist Enver Hoxha and his Party of Labor. CSU head Markus Söder took advantage of the opportunity at the retreat to assure the Albanian that his country “belongs in the EU.”

In May, a beaming Rama stood next to German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, both of them keynote speakers at the Charlemagne Prize award ceremony in Aachen – where he invoked the ethos of tolerance in the spirit of Thomas Mann. Exchanging kisses with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who had the privilege of staying in Rama’s villa on the Adriatic in the summer of 2023 together with her family, has become almost routine.

Edi Rama, 60, has been prime minister of EU accession candidate Albania for the last 11 years, a towering man with rather ordinary manners. A man who receives state guests in trainers and journalists, occasionally, barefoot. A late product of the socialist bourgeoisie, he speaks several languages at a high level in addition to being a former national basketball player and an internationally recognized visual artist. For many in the West, he is the cosmopolitan face of Albania.

Corruption at All Levels

Even U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken paid a visit to the Albanian capital Tirana in February and found words of praise for “Edi” – including for his judicial reform. “Corrupt officials are being held accountable,” Blinken said. “Members of organized crime are going to prison and losing their assets. So this is a very powerful process.”

But in the most recent annual review from Blinken’s own State Department, the narrative is rather different. The 2023 country report for the NATO member state of Albania reads: “Corruption existed in all branches and levels of government.”

All levels.

That means: also at the very top. Rama’s political opponents claim that the long-time prime minister has transformed the country into an autocracy riven with drug money. Or more precisely: He has tolerated the rise of organized crime, they say. Rama rejects the allegations.

When confronted by DER SPIEGEL with such accusations, the prime minister called late one night and tried to influence our report: He said he finds the accusations to be without substance, insulting and undeservedly harmful to his country’s reputation.

In June, Rama was asked by an Italian journalist how it was possible that one member of his closest circle after the other, including various ministers, have been arrested for corruption, but that he is still in office? The cool response from the Albanian prime minister: “There are pigs in every forest.”

Stabilizing the Balkans

From the perspective of the West, Rama looks like a stabilizing force in the Balkans. In particular, the model he negotiated with Meloni has generated interest far beyond Italy: The plan calls for the asylum applications of refugees intercepted in Italian territorial waters in the Mediterranean to be processed on Albanian territory.

But the more popular Rama appears outside the borders of Albania, the greater the anger in his immediate vicinity. Those from his closest orbit, the ones who know the most and who have the most to lose, only speak on the condition of anonymity. Others have taken to the streets. In July, angry demonstrators hurled Molotov cocktails against Rama’s offices in Tirana. The scorch marks have since been removed.

Other, older remnants can still be found in the center of Tirana. The pyramids, for example, a structure inside of which the marble statue of Enver Hoxha once stood, created by Edi Rama’s father. Kristaq Rama was an artist with close ties to the system – a man who, as a member of the so-called Presidium of the People’s Assembly, was shown to have been a signatory in 1988 to a death sentence for opposition poet Havzi Nela, who was then hanged.

The new, brighter present is symbolized by a transparent building of glass and steel. Here is where SPAK has its headquarters, Albania’s anti-corruption body. It was founded in 2019 on the insistence of the U.S. and the EU. The incumbent head of the administration was not considered to be among Rama’s favorites. In the decisive vote, he likely benefited from the fact that the U.S. ambassador insisted on personally overseeing the process to ensure that there were no improprieties – a clear vote of no confidence in the prime minister.

VIP Prison with a Gym

SPAK’s record thus far looks as follows: Rama’s first interior minister was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for abuse of office – initially in connection with the drug trade but ultimately for a different infraction. Rama’s former environment minister received a sentence in September 2023 of six years and eight months behind bars for corruption. The deputy health minister was forced to resign for abuse of office. And his former boss ended up in jail in July 2024 for embezzling EU funds.

Albania is now home to VIP prisons, as the investigative platform BIRN recently reported: detention centers equipped with wards in which socialist dignitaries who have fallen from grace can serve their time with their own kitchen, shower and fitness studio.

Still, those from Rama’s immediate orbit who find themselves facing potential difficulties tend to prefer skipping the country. One of those is Arben Ahmetaj, who became Rama’s economy minister in 2013 before later switching to the Finance Ministry and then, in 2021, becoming deputy prime minister. Political observers in Tirana regard Ahmetaj as the long-standing “treasurer” and a key figure in the prime minister’s system of rule. In July 2022, Rama fired him – because, it is said, of the mountain of incriminating evidence piling up against Ahmetaj. For the prime minister, his longtime companion was threatening to become a risk.

One year later, the socialist-dominated parliament lifted Ahmetaj’s immunity – with the appropriate delay. Ahmetaj, who had been charged with corruption and money laundering, had plenty of time to disappear. A few days after he did, SPAK issued an international arrest warrant, but he remains underground.

The Rama System

“Would it bother you if I smoked a cigar?” asks Arben Ahmetaj during a meeting on the terrace of a café in the Lugano city center. The lake is glittering to the left, while to the right, Swiss pedestrians and tourists are taking care of some late-day shopping.

Ahmetaj is well-traveled and isn’t averse to a bit of luxury. Even as a young man, he was considered a rising star within the Albanian socialists. He is referred to as “Tiger” back home. Currently – despite the international arrest warrant – he is enjoying exile in Lugano and is hoping to receive political asylum in Switzerland.

Ahmetaj declines to say anything about the accusations that have been leveled against him back home. About, for example, whether he was the one who brought in the masterminds behind a scandal involving Albanian waste incineration plants – those dubious projects that mostly went unbuilt, but which cost Albanian taxpayers hundreds of millions of euros. According to independent journalists, the money ended up in the pockets of those with close ties to the government – and in the hands of media outlets sympathetic to them.

Ahmetaj’s luxury trips, apparently financed by those behind the scandal and enjoyed alternately with his wife and his mistress, to five-star hotels in Milan or on the Côte d’Azur, likewise are not a primary focus of our meeting. Rather, he wants to talk about Edi Rama.

Ok. After 11 years in power, how much responsibility does Rama bear for the fact that Albania, despite billions in development aid from the West, is still considered by Transparency International to be one of the most corrupt countries in Europe?

Ahmetaj sets his cold cigar in the ashtray and says of his relationship to Rama, who he sometimes refers to as “Kim Jong Un,” in reference to the North Korean dictator: “I am not prepared to play scapegoat for the prime minister. He has taken advantage of the judicial reform that was financed by the U.S. and the EU. Now, he is using the judiciary against his opponents and against anyone else who seeks to stand in the way of his hunger for power.”

He suspects, says the former deputy prime minister, that the Rama System is being silently tolerated in the West. “I have no idea why the Europeans don’t want to see what is going on in Albania. They have excellent secret services who possess detailed knowledge, in particular about money laundering and organized crime.”

Ahmetaj confirms findings from investigators who allege that during Rama’s tenure, Albania has become a narco-state that feeds off the drug trade. “Flooding the country with cannabis from 2014 to 2017 was the prime minister’s hidden economic agenda.” The rise in organized crime that came along with it drastically changed Albania’s economy and society, he says. “Rama believes that he still controls the criminal milieu, but it has long been him who is controlled.”

Are the Europeans Turning a Blind Eye?

“Ursula von der Leyen calls him ‘dear Edi,’ that’s already an indication,” says Frauke Seebass from the Brussels office of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a reference to the European Commission president. “You have to see the Rama phenomenon in a broader context. From the EU perspective, it is a business-like approach to stabilizing the Western Balkans. In contrast to Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia, for example, Rama is not considered to be anti-European and is much easier to deal with. For that reason, the decision has been made to turn a blind eye, or maybe two.”

Whether Rama is enriching himself to the detriment of others? “From the perspective of Brussels, it’s not all that important,” says Seebass. “Albania’s EU accession isn’t on the agenda anyway for the foreseeable future.”

For his part, the Albanian prime minister told the Italian state broadcaster RAI: “That politics in Albania have been poisoned by the mafia – I honestly don’t see it.” Ahmetaj’s claim that mafia bosses have free access to his office, says Rama, is an untruthful accusation made even worse by the fact that “people tend to believe lies before they believe the truth.”

Rama is concerned about his country’s reputation. “When it comes to EU membership, our patience is endless,” the prime minister told DER SPIEGEL two years ago on the grounds of his villa on the Adriatic Sea. Albania, he says, was an isolated dictatorship, “the North Korea of Europe, where it was still dangerous to listen to the Beatles at the end of the 1980s. That is why I maintain that, in absolute terms, we have achieved more in these 30 years than any other country in Europe.”

Poverty, Unemployment, Emigration

The statistics tell a different story. According to data from the Albanian Institute of Statistics, more than a third of the country’s former population of 3.3 million have left the country since 1991. Average monthly salaries are the equivalent of around 750 euros. Almost a third of the youth that are still in the country are unemployed.

“The convergence of political and media interests with those of criminals and oligarchs” – that is how the Rama System works, according to a former member of government who insists on remaining anonymous. “All of that takes place with the blessing of the U.S. and the EU. There is not a single public tender that doesn’t end up in his expanded orbit. Essentially, Rama has driven the entire country into criminality. Albania has become a perfect case study in corruption, and yet the crafty Rama still manages to gain recognition in the West.”

Fatos Lubonja is one of those who agreed to use his name when expressing fundamental criticism of the prime minister. The prominent author is seen as the conscience of the Albanian left. Lubonja is the son of a Hoxha confident who later fell afoul of the dictator. He spent 17 years in prison, most of it in labor camps like the notorious Spaç mine. Only in 1991, as one of the last political prisoners, was he released.

“I saw myself in young Edi Rama,” says Lubonja. “Both of us wanted to step out from the shadow of our pro-regime fathers.” Rama, though, became mayor of Tirana in 2000 and he has been prime minister since 2013. The many years in power, says Lubonja, have changed him. “He has become a spiteful narcissist, a clever guy without convictions, Dr. Jekyll during the day and Mr. Hyde at night, a person who needs power like oxygen to breathe.”

Lubonja also complains that the West, especially Europe’s center-left political parties, ignore Albania’s gloomy reality. “What crude oil is for other countries are the drug dealers and their money in Rama’s Albania,” says the former dissident. The last time the two spoke, he says, he called the prime minister a “fraud,” though, as Lubonja says, he probably didn’t care. “Because he is a crocodile – a large mouth and no ears.”

From Cannabis to Cocaine

Next year, Rama will be running for a fourth term. And his chances of re-election are good. “Ninety percent of the municipalities are now in his hands, it’s almost like Russia,” says the investigative journalist Klodiana Lala. “As long as nobody stands up and says: ‘I personally handed money to Edi Rama,’ nothing is going to happen to him. The mafia’s law of silence, the law of omertà, is in effect.”

Several investigators have confirmed to both Italian state broadcaster RAI and DER SPIEGEL that contacts with organized crime have taken place at the highest levels of government. The early trade in cannabis has since morphed into a business involving cocaine by the ton, they say. The Albanian syndicates, investigators believe, have established networks with the Calabrian N’drangheta and with cartels in Latin America.

Italian public prosecutor Francesco Mandoi, who served temporarily as Rama’s anti-corruption commissioner, has come to a sobering conclusion: “The drug bosses have their people everywhere in administration, in the institutions. They are now able to get the government to do their bidding.” Mandoi says that his warnings found no resonance in top levels of government.

Investments from Kushner and Grenell

The money from the Albanian drug mafia has also made itself visible in the form of skyscrapers, which have transformed the erstwhile dreary Tirana cityscape. Construction also continues apace on the Adriatic coast. Donald Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner and Richard Grenell, the former U.S. special envoy for peace talks between Serbia and Kosovo, are both planning large investments there with Rama’s blessing. Rama, Grenell and Trump have known and appreciated each other since the time when they pursued a plan to redraw the borders of Kosovo and Serbia under the eyes of the EU foreign policy chief.

Is Rama selling his country’s crown jewels in exchange for political goodwill? The senior FBI agent Charles McGonigal, who has been convicted, admitted that he accepted bribes in Albania for services in the interest of the government. He also admitted to having been party to several meetings with Edi Rama in government buildings. The prime minister has denied any wrongdoing.

“McGonigal was paid by people from Rama’s office,” says Sali Berisha, who became the first democratically elected president of Albania in 1992 and is the founder of the Democratic Party of Albania. He is sitting on the eighth floor of a residential tower in central Tirana and he is furious.

Berisha is under house arrest. He has been accused of corruption and he is also banned from entering the United States. The former head of state hasn’t been allowed to leave his apartment for the last 200 days. He only occasionally receives guests. Just a few minutes ago, Ilir Meta walked out of the door, also a former president. Now, Berisha can finally vent.

“I still have clear memories of the Hoxha dictatorship, and not even then were things as centralized as they now are under Rama,” says Berisha, who is just short of his 80th birthday and is wearing a green-yellow tie with his white shirt and silver cufflinks. “Albania is a kind of dictatorship, the first and only narco-state in Europe.”

Berisha pulls out his tablet and shows data intended to prove that Edi Rama’s brother Olsi is also involved in the drug trade. Olsi Rama has rejected the accusations. Berisha, though, insists on his claim that the West ignoring what is really going on in Albania. “You are marching blindfolded into a catastrophe.”

From Berisha’s eighth-floor balcony, the people down on Tirana’s Mustafa-Matohiti Street look tiny. Every evening at 8 p.m. they gather, his supporters – to celebrate their hero under house arrest. Berisha appears briefly, rants for a short time against Rama’s “narco-dictatorship,” and then disappears again. After a few minutes, it’s over. Until the next evening.

Edi Rama will survive that as well.