Tony Blair’s man in Albania

A preview of the Albanian Parliamentary elections

Imagine, for a moment, that your Prime Minister was a philandering, corrupt drunkard from the same school of thought as the previous Communist regime. Picture, as difficult as it might be, a Prime Minister who prostrates himself in front of Eurocrat ghouls for meagre concessions and weaponises every arm of the state to persecute his political opponents, citing vague ‘transfers in Russian roubles’. Then, imagine also a Prime Minister who, as the spiritual child and personal friend of Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell, wants to devolve powers to a proposed ‘Vatican-style’ city-state for Bektashi clerics.

This is your reality if you are an Albanian. Three mandates and twelve years of Starmerism imposed on a population that has already been ravished by corruption.

With elections in Albanian fast approaching (11 May), now is a better time than ever to demonstrate to readers what happens when you inject Blairism into a political system primarily known for Ottoman skulduggery. In brief, Albania traditionally has a two-party system. The incumbents, the centre-left Socialist Party (PS), led by Edi Rama, command a majority. The great majority of the remainder of seats are occupied by the centre-right Democratic Party (PD), led by Sali Barisha.

The best we can say here is that the two parties have avoided any ridiculous rebrandings or unappealing abbreviations, something which cannot be said of most countries in Eastern Europe. Sadly, the positives end there. We first cannot avoid mentioning the fact that Albania’s Socialist Party is the direct and legitimate successor of Enver Hoxha’s Communist Party — the party that ruled the most repressive state in Europe after the Second World War. In fact, Edi Rama’s father was a signatory to the last hanging in Albania. From Rama’s twelve-year tenure, you can tell that he’s inherited all of his father’s worst traits.

There isn’t much of say about polling either. Most television stations in Albania will conduct polling that quite explicitly favours Edi Rama, usually putting him ahead by 15 to 20 points. This is tacit voter suppression; after all, many people won’t bother to vote if they think their party is so far behind that they can’t possibly win.

The opposition, the PD, under the tutelage of Sali Berisha, has a comeback story somewhat akin to, and perhaps even worthy of, Donald Trump himself. Berisha, Albania’s former President (1992-7) and Prime Minister (2005-13), has leaned heavily into this narrative. He wrested back control of the party from Lulzim Basha, who had lost the previous two elections — perhaps not in the most legitimate way, but in the case of Albania, it doesn’t really matter; that’s just how things are here. Berisha, like Trump, commands a large and fanatical minority of the electorate. These people will never be swayed against him and will almost certainly turn up to vote. Berisha, like Trump, is very old indeed — in fact, at 80, he is two years older than Trump — but remains full of vitality. (Perhaps not coincidentally, both are teetotallers.) In 2021, Berisha was expelled from his party when the United States, followed by Britain, designated him a persona non grata despite no formal charges or any published evidence, mirroring Trump’s own legal persecution.

All there was behind this was innuendos, gossip, and the McGonigal File — Albania’s very own version of the fraudulent Steele Dossier. This, with stiff competition, led to perhaps the most egregious case of opposition suppression in recent European history. After all, in most NATO-aligned European countries, being blacklisted by the American government is career-ending. Conveniently for Rama, the McGonigal File came exactly at the same time that Berisha decided to return to frontline politics. The American decision crippled his international credibility and split the (Albanian) Democrats. Fortunately, in Albania, this blacklisting ultimately proved to be more a locker-room hazing; an initiation ritual. Barisha has come out of it a stronger man.

But what exactly happened? Meet Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI’s New York field office. He was indicted in 2023 for accepting $225,000 in bribes from Albanian businessman and ‘former’ intelligence officer Agron Neza, a known associate of Edi Rama. In return, McGonigal had pushed for investigations into the Albanian opposition and had used his clout to pressure American companies into not doing business with those aligned with the (Albanian) Democratic Party. It is more than likely that, with assurances from Edi Rama (who he had met numerous times), McGonigal cooked up a tampered file that would persuade Anthony Blinken to blacklist Berisha and his family. But, much to Rama and McGonigal’s dismay, this wouldn’t dissuade Berisha, who ignored this and simply marched into the party headquarters and seized it Mussolini-style.

Even after McGonigal’s arrest on bribery charges and a whole host of other unrelated crimes pertaining to Russia in 2023, the witch hunt continued as if nothing had happened. Weaponising a ‘reformed’ — in reality captured — judiciary, Rama, with the EU’s seal of approval, placed Berisha under house arrest in December 2023 on even more dubious corruption charges and on the grounds that he was a flight risk. This was despite the fact that Berisha’s passport had already been seized, and that most of the country knows his address. While those investigated for corruption in Albania tend to flee to Dubai, Berisha instead chose to preach his political gospel from his balcony to thousands, as well as the entire press. Berisha was released in November last year, finally putting an end to the farce.

Emboldened by the much more friendly Trump Administration, Berisha is being guided by senior 2024 Trump campaign advisor Chris LaCivita. For the first time, the Right in Albania has given itself a makeover. It has moved away from vague promises of ‘freedom and prosperity’ — which may have served it well thirty years ago, but which have become stale — and onto more incisive rhetoric. It is now staunchly Atlanticist, in the sense of being strongly orientated towards the Republican Party, rather than merely promising pensioners more money and building a few roads. Edi Rama, on the other hand, is doubling down on his New Labour-style transformation of the country. Rama, it should be noted, is so close to Blair that he used to holiday with him, and had Alistair Campbell advising him for years.

The similarities with Blair and Starmer are genuinely uncanny. Take the Open Balkan initiative, a bilateral trade and political agreement between Albania, Serbia, and North Macedonia. It has nothing to do with regional conciliation (desirable), but rather is a scheme to consolidate regional real estate. Rama sells this abroad as progress towards ‘regional unity’; a peace-building miracle. In reality, it has merely kicked the can, Kosovo, down the road, as Rama failed to obtain any concessions regarding its autonomy and independence. Just imagine, for a moment, if Britain reconciled, at the price of nothing, with a hostile neighbour which claimed its territory and was more than willing to turn a blind eye to the activities of separatist terrorists? Surely if this happened, and especially if this happened without even consulting any of the people who remained loyal to Britain, this leader would not be able to win three elections on the trot. But when a man is more concerned with ‘moral victories’ and photo-ops with drunks in Brussels than maintaining his own country’s territorial integrity, what do you expect? After all, the only people who are happy with this initiative are the Eurocrats, Vučić, and whatever the Albanian equivalent of Tufton Street is, where legions of people with ‘International Relations’ degrees from abroad can finally have something to show for their efforts.

In his latest display of Blairite statecraft, Rama has proposed the establishment of a self-governing Bektashi enclave, devoted to the most syncretic strand of Islam in the entire world. This is pure moral grandstanding, solely intended to allow Rama to present Albania as the ‘moderate face of Islam’ in Europe — all while allowing Saudi and Qatari NGOs to operate with impunity, preaching Salafism and death to Shi’ites. Just imagine if Britain had surrendered a large portion of its capital to an Islamic theocracy: there would be riots!

Albania has also managed to speed-run a decade of insane European immigration policies in just three years. On top of importing contract workers from the Third World, Rama also plans on accommodating 36,000 refugees every single year in a purpose-made refugee camp, turning Albania into Italy’s outsourced asylum-processing warehouse. Why? Partly, perhaps, to curry favour with the EU, doing them a favour while positioning the country in such a way that an outsider could claim it has made ‘progress’. But mostly it’s because he wants to get into Giorgia Meloni’s pants. I’ve seen this bald dweeb get touchy-feely with her on at least six different occasions. You can’t miss it: he’s the guy wearing Comme des Garçons, a logo t-shirt, and cropped trousers in a room full of suits. Compare to Berisha: the country’s top cardiologist who only eats what his wife cooks him. Rama, by contrast, seduced another man’s wife and married her.

‘Doing the jobs natives are too lazy to do’ is usually only the favoured line of a few journalists and race-baiters in Britain, not the political class itself. In Albania, by contrast, you can hear Edi Rama himself scold people to their faces with this narrative when pressed on the matter. You may think that Albania suffers from exorbitant levels of emigration, and that would be true. But it also has an equally exorbitant 27% youth unemployment rate, completely nullifying any argument to be made in favour of Indian petrol station workers. There’s also a trend, prevalent across all of Eastern Europe, both inside and outside of the EU, which reveals a borderline psychotic streak: namely, that much of their support for immigration is merely cargo-cult politics. ‘If Germany does it, so should we’ is the logic here; immigration equals progress, which in turn must equal prosperity, nothing more and nothing less.

At least our politics can be entertaining. In Albania, you can watch left-wing news channels showing the Mayor of Tirana, Erion Veliaj, plant flowers in a nursery ‘live’, while other channels show a livestream of his arrest by SPAK, a special anti-corruption police force. The charges? Embezzling money through a host of NGOs. This came to light after his wife went on a €800k shopping spree in Paris. A man who used to sell figs was buying earrings that cost more than his annual salary. Angela Rayner taking a swig from Starmer’s special scotch has nothing on this.

In fact, it’s more than likely that Edi Rama himself threw Veliaj under the bus so he could say to the EU that he had investigated himself and his allies, and found some of them guilty of corruption. Rama even had ex-President (and former coalition partner) Ilir Meta arrested on yet more trumped-up corruption charges. Footage of Meta being boxed in to his car and dragged out by masked, armed policemen was broadcast to the masses. Pure kino.

They say that Columbia is the home of magical realism, but if Gabriel García Márquez were alive today he’d be living in Tirana watching Edi Rama, a former professional basketball player, painter, and rapper quote Baudrillard and Derrida to a bunch of pensioners. But actually, García Márquez wouldn’t be able to afford to live in Tirana: in a country with well under three million people but enough properties to house ten million, mostly thanks to drug cartels running riot, Tirana still somehow ranks as one of the most expensive capitals in Europe when adjusting for purchasing power. The average Albanian spends more on fruit than any other Europeans barring the Swiss. In the EU, the average cost of a motorway is around €5-12 million per kilometre; in Albania, it’s €30 million.

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Although the opinion polls are unlikely to tell us much, it is true that it is unlikely that the Democrats will be able to win the 71 seats needed for a majority. This is partly because many of the people who would vote for them have left the country. Albania’s best and brightest are now in Germany, while the not-so-bright are busy selling cocaine in London (guess who makes more money). Entire villages in the once solidly right-wing north have been emptied, leaving behind only old men and women in half-finished castles who think of little other than their pensions when voting.

But perhaps even more worrying is that this election, like all the others, is completely rigged. The scale of voter suppression and the audacity of Socialist Party functionaries in Albania in committing electoral fraud is positively Latin American. I know for a fact that Socialist delegates have blatantly bribed voters in a mayoral election in 2019, with a van carrying packages labeled ‘State Material Reserves’. In this instance the van was intercepted by opposition activists, but it would be foolish to think that this was an isolated case.

When money doesn’t work, the Socialists resort to blackmail. There have been a number of incidents caught on camera of public sector employees and contractors being threatened with the loss of employment and social security if they didn’t turn up to rallies or vote. In the local elections of 2019, leaked messages from Tirana’s municipal police chief showed him warning that ‘…on Monday, the fingers of everyone in the municipality will be checked’ — a reference to the ink marks used to indicate that you’ve voted. If this wasn’t bad enough, they even managed to find ways to coerce the diaspora, who will be voting for the first time this year: those threatened with sanctions in Albania are now being asked for proof that their relatives abroad voted the right way also.

The only two saving graces could be the diaspora vote and the appeal of the minor right-wing parties. The diaspora vote will be dominated by the combined Greek and Italian diaspora electorate, though it remains unclear how many will bother to participate given that we have no historical data to go by. But I can at least confirm that the combined American, British, and German diaspora electorate will lean to the Right (partly because they are relatively well-off). The ‘Opportunity Party’, Albania’s unabashedly neoliberal, snazzy suits-and-ties party that wants to erode the state and implement an 8% flat tax is a refreshing break from most of the other right-wing parties in Europe that are only concerned with being ‘based’. It makes sense: you’ll never get Albanians around to culture wars regardless of what you do or say, at least not any time soon.

A coalition might be the best outcome, as it would help keep in check the Democrats who, while not as bad as the Socialists, have a big history of corruption themselves. But at least we can say that Sali Berisha did build some roads when he was in power; meanwhile, since Edi Rama was elected, despite €2bn of investment, the total length of Albania’s roads has decreased.

It’s high time that this bumbling Blairite cocaine addict gets thrown out of office. With stiff competition, he’s the worst socialist painter to ever live; certainly, he’s the worst to ever govern a country. If I have to see this baldie trying to neck Meloni at the next NATO conference, I might need another electroconvulsive therapy session.

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Image credits: Matti Blume, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike

This article was written by Henry Reynolds Skelton, a regular Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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