Edi Rama: 'Albania in Europe by 2030' with the contribution of a virtual minister

'By the end of the decade, Albania will finally be able to enter its home', i.e. the European Union. This was said by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama on Saturday 20 September on the Radio 24 programme 'Friends and Enemies', by Daniele Bellasio and Marianna Aprile.

An all-round discussion whose main steps concern Tirana's EU accession process, which is currently in the middle of negotiations. Indeed, talks with the European Commission should be concluded by 2027. "If this phase proceeds as it should, eventually the Commission will give the European Council a positive opinion to admit us into the Union. After that, it will take a further two years for ratification by the national parliaments." These, in short, are the stages still to be completed by 2030.

Yet, Albania already has very close relations with the European Union and its member states. Above all with Italy, with which in 2023 it signed the protocol allowing Rome to send migrants rejected by our country to the Centres of Permanence for Repatriation (CPR) in Shengjin and Gjader. A policy, this one, to which Rama agreed only because 'it was our executive that called'. "We are not willing to make such agreements with other countries. They cannot come and ask us to solve the immigration problem for them,' he said. "The Italy-Albania protocol exists because we have always had a special relationship with your country. You have helped us on many occasions, even when there was nothing to receive in return'. And here the premier cites, among other things, the sending of Italian firefighters after the 2019 earthquake - "hundreds of men who arrived to save lives in a country that was not their own" - and the case of the Vlora ship. It was 1991, the Albanian communist regime was about to wane and thousands of people fleeing a collapsing state arrived in Bari on a packed ship. 'The Italian people were very open,' says Rama. "It was politics, in some cases, that behaved badly. I remember Umberto Bossi saying to let the migrants die at sea'. That period, however, according to the president is not comparable to today: if on the one hand Europe 'needs regular immigration to cope with the demographic winter' and is wrong to postpone adopting policies 'to welcome foreign labour', on the other hand 'you cannot give up controlling its borders'.

The future entry into the European Union, however, is not the only news in sight for Albania. In his speech on the Radio 24 programme 'Friends and Enemies', Edi Rama also spoke of something unprecedented for the Tirana government and international politics in general. This week, in fact, he made his first public speech Diella, the virtual minister who works thanks to artificial intelligence.

Equipped with an empathetic tone and dressed in traditional clothes (these were the standards chosen to 'design' her), Diella - which means Sun in Albanian - 'is an avatar initially created to provide online public services on the national platform E-Albania, which our citizens at home or abroad can use via their smartphone to access 95 per cent of administrative and bureaucratic services. So far, Diella has provided 36,000 documents for one million people'.