Speech by Prime Minister Edi Rama at the traditional meeting with members of the Diplomatic Corps accredited to Albania ahead of the end-of-the-year holidays:

 

Your Excellencies,

Dear friends, 

Good evening! 

We have come together here tonight in this traditional event after another year full of new challenges, uncertainties, and opportunities, too, is ending and a new year is coming.

Some good friends of a year ago are not with us today and to the new ones that have replaced them, I would like to extend my warmest welcome around this family table. It is a big public secret that Albania is a great place to be for foreigners and especially for ambassadors and, first and foremost, for the American ones.

Not a single one yet has left this country without regretting the end of the tenure and many witnesses have confirmed time and again that they haven’t been able to remove Albania from the privileged place in their core and minds. If someone would help me with a glass, I would ask you to join me wishing in their absence a very happy New Year to all of them and may the eagles of this country help them in the way ahead. So, a toast to your predecessors who are not here anymore! I am sure they are very jealous of you tonight. 

While you are invited for a joyful moment in this new gem of Albania’s young agritourism industry, which opened its doors tonight for the first time to host us, I want you  – and this is out of the script – to join me and give an applause for the people who made this beauty happen, Blerina and her husband. I wish that everyone that it is still capable watching and listening to my speech today to come here, Blerina Farm in Laknas! Wonderful! 

Unfortunately, I still have to bring here the tremendous daily pains of Gaza after the horrors of the seventh of October. It is my duty and, frankly, everyone’s duty to not be silent about that in every possible occasion, while a devastation of monumental proportions is going on under the world’s watch. Without moving an inch from the very firm position that there is no place for Hamas and his likes in the world we want to live in, we Albanians cannot accept the perpetual denial of the screaming right of the Palestinian people to have their own safe place in this world, their own right to give birth and raise their children in their own state. I know very well that guaranteeing such a basic condition for millions of Palestinians is too much easier said than done, as it is in fact too much easier said than done for the Jewish people to live in their land without anyone questioning their right to exist.

Nevertheless, it is not too difficult to assess that so much violence and destruction cannot be the long-term solution for both Israel and Palestine. Let me wish that the New Year will bring a lifting spirit of peace and reconciliation and evade the dark spirits of war and devastation for the Holy Land, where people of all faiths deserve to live in harmony as children of the same God.

I wish that the New Year will also bring new light of peace for the Ukrainians, who have continued to fight all the way against a ruthless aggressor and will always have our solidarity and unwavering support. 

It has been a good year for Albania though and I would like to thank you all for being our good companions in a journey of hope, ambition and hard work to transform this country into the Europe of the Western Balkans. I can’t be prouder of the friendship we have nourished and strengthened during this journey and I can’t thank enough our friends in the European Union for the stronger support we are getting from them. The change of their attitude towards Albania and the Western Balkans in general has been unimaginable until not long ago. It means a world to us and we don’t take it lightly, but with the full burden of responsibility that increases in every step that takes us closer.

Our progress in the accession talks has just started and thanks to more than a 1000 women and men engaged in the last 14 months on behalf of Albania and 777 subjects of the screening process show that we have started this new demanding and transformation process of negotiations with the right foot. It was far from easier to envisage the top performance of such a large national team, but it wasn’t at all easier to envisage Albania’s national soccer team on top of the group at the end of the 2024 Euro qualifiers.

Nevertheless, both happened this year and both are strong reasons to ask for more from ourselves and to never stop working to become better in every field and every time we play.

Albania is doing better, but the best is yet to come and I am sure, actually more than sure, that the coming year will be better than this one, which has been our best year so far.

The tourism boom will be followed by a much bigger success story in 2024, which will open a new chapter of beyond 10 million tourists. 2024 will enter as the year with the lowest public debt since we took office and with the highest revenues thanks to important improvements we are prepared to implement in tax collection, while without increasing a single tax. National currency Lek has never been stronger, inflation is back to a normal rate and more private investments, both local and foreign investments, will pour into the country’s economy. The average salary in the public sector will rise to a record high of 900 euros, followed by a further significant increase of wages in the private sector and further decrease in unemployment rate, which is expected to fall below a 10% rate.

New major infrastructure and energy projects will be launched, from the Blue Corridor’s new segments to the call for the international tender for construction of the new port of Durres, which will be a big game changer for the whole region; from the new gas pipeline that will connect the renewed Vlora thermal power plant to the new solar and wind plants. Let’s hope that finally, after years of hard work and harder patience, in the coming year we will receive the great news we are expecting from the explorations in Shpirag and that finally the world-known Dutch traders will speak out and won’t keep from us still the secret of this big exploration.

My script finishes here and guess what I stopped writing because I was really afraid that it would be yet another long speech. I believe it is enough to speak now about what’s next, it is much better to look forward for it and I am convinced that this beautiful place with extraordinary Albanian wines, with the music that I very much hope will live up to the taste with which this place has been created, with these friends around it is more than enough to continue this beautiful evening. It started beautifully and experience shows that these kind of traditional evenings in the end of the year start beautifully and end even better. Thank you all and if I can get again my glass, I would like to raise a toast primarily for your families, because at the end they are the ones that pay the price for all your work out of home and for also your quite entertaining life in Albanian politics and for everything they have to do while they have to wait for you. At the same time,  I would like to say the same for the families of my colleagues here, who have even a more difficult task, because they have not only to wait for us to go home, but they also have to hear terrible things about us during the day.

And in conclusion, drinking for all of your families, I would also like to propose a toast for my own family and for my better half. She gets better and better, whereas I get worse and worse, but this is how it is. Cheers for your families, for your kids, and for your loved ones. May all of them and you all have primarily a healthy New Year, a joyful New Year and a very successful New Year!

Thank you!