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A group of foreign journalists have visited Tirana to report the latest update. They had a lunch with PM Edi Rama.
Tony Barber, editor of Europe for Financial Times, starts his article by describing Rama as a good English speaker, with an independent intellectual Balkan mind grown up in the communist era, passionate about the future of Albania in the EU, but who foresees danger in Balkan countries if they are deprived of EU accession.
Financial Times quotes Rama that the fatigue of the enlargement is some kind of complacency for those who have forgotten why the EU was built. Rama says that the founders of the EU would feel ashamed from this, and that Europe needs Balkan as much as Balkan needs Europe, and that EU accession is a matter of security for Europe.
Rama has spoken about the potential risks of radical Islam in Balkan, and said that if a young man in Tunis feels unsafe for the future, Albania has Europe as the shining start to follow. He underlined that Balkan has pro-European Muslims in Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
As for the Greek crisis and its political impact in Athens, Rama said that before the crisis, the Greek were Albania’s bigger brother and the only neighbor that was also in the EU and NATO. Rama said that Antonis Samaras made respectable efforts to return Greece to the right place, but things changed once again with the radical left of Alexis Tsipras.
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