British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has been in Albania attending the European Political Council (EPC) meeting and famously having a bilateral meeting with his Albanian counterpart Edi Rama. As a leader recently elected with a large majority, Sir Keir will doubtless have recognised the glow in Tirana reflecting the fact that Rama was elected to his fourth term last week increasing his majority in the process. Among political leaders, nothing generates more respect than success at the ballot box.
This post is not about the two leaders’ discussions about migration, other than in one crucial respect: while it’s natural to imagine that one’s own problems are unique, migration - one way or another (literally) - is now an unavoidable concern for all European countries, and many beyond Europe. This week’s topic is a more general one: whatever image we have of ourselves and others, there are always things we can learn from looking at how others succeed. Diplomats, like the rest of us, should always be on the lookout for what we can learn. From my experience of Albania, there is indeed something important we can learn from Edi Rama.
Edi Rama has been in Albanian politics since the late 1990s. A charismatic artist and 6’7” former basketball player, his picture appears regularly in the international media, often alongside the brightly-coloured apartment blocks he had painted to brighten up a once-drab former communist city. With longevity and charisma inevitably goes controversy - and many will give you less flattering explanations for his political success. But it remains that he’s still there and still enjoys popularity with a significant part of the population and has also in general been a partner with whom Europeans (and the US) can do business, while steering a careful course in the difficult relationships in the Balkans. On the detail of Albanian politics today, I’ll diplomatically - but also honestly - say I’m not up to date.
When I first met Edi Rama in 2001, he was in his second year as Mayor of Tirana. The city was fairly peaceful if strikingly undeveloped compared with today, but everywhere you looked you could see evidence of the lawlessness which had prevailed only a few years earlier as a result in the collapse of government after the “pyramid” scandal of the late 1990s. While I was in Tirana, my German colleague seriously hurt himself falling into a hole on an unlit street, falling victim to the thieves who had stolen the manhole covers for the metal. Nearby where he had his accident, I remember going to the barbers: the young woman who was going to cut my hair told me (in Albanian) that I woudl first have to help her. How, exactly? By dragging the portable diesel generator out onto the pavement so she would be able to turn on the electricity.
Much has improved in Tirana since then and today’s visitor might wonder how the improvement started. I’d say with Edi Rama. One of the most visible consequences of the unrest were the illegal buildings which had sprouted throughout the city, in public parks and on any spare piece of land. As a result, when I arrived in the city, streets were strewn with rubble and rubbish, dangerous wires taking illegal supplies of electricity from pylons and lampposts. It wasn’t the environment to instil civic pride.
Mayor Rama started the process of tidying up, planting flowers around public buildings and employing people to keep them tended. More boldly, he promised to demolish the illegal buildings, including those which had turned Tirana’s narrow but (potentially) attractive central river into a rat-infested sewer. Along with many of my diplomatic colleagues, I wasn’t convinced that the trumpeted demolition was going to take place, but it certainly did. Indeed, watching the bulldozers became an engaging but also instructive pastime for diplomats as for locals. The riverbank was cleaned up, grass relayed. The demolition did even more good than the colourful apartment blocks. Rama refreshed the Town Hall, giving himself a very grand office, the walls covered with a panorama of the old city. But crucially - and for the first time - he opened in the town hall a public information office where people could go for help with their transactions with the municipality. Perhaps the first example of a customer-friendly public service.
There’s surely a lesson here. There can be many routes to political success: long-term plans, grand ideologies, divide and rule, corruption, intimidation. In business too, there’s an endless supply of “leadership” manuals telling you how you can make a difference. I hope there aren’t too many recommending corruption or intimidation. With the steps he took in Tirana, it seemed to me that Edi Rama was an excellent example of a leader who recognised that one good way to political success was getting the small things right and helping to create a virtuous circle in which people’s daily lives seemed to be getting better. And that’s not a bad lesson for all the EPC delegates to take home from their trip to Tirana, or for the rest of us.
It makes me wonder: the obvious extra-parliamentary route to leadership in Britain is the London mayoralty, as Boris Johnson (for better or worse) proved. You have direct executive authority (albeit less than I think they should), so you can have a greater effect than any backbench MP and many ministers. Are the other elected mayoralties of sufficient moment to do the same? (I'm sure Andy Burnham's turned that over in his mind once or twice.) Could a popular, dynamic, effective Mayor of the West Midlands, or of West Yorkshire, or of Liverpool clear a path to his or her party leadership?