Just over five months ago, Edi Rama, leader of Albania’s Socialist Party, won his fourth consecutive election to remain prime minister, a post he has held since 2013. As Albania’s Riviera became the in-destination for the jet-setting crowd, Rama became the toast of society.
Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative Forum in May 2025, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, spoke about how he met Rama on the Rothschilds’ yacht in 2021 while cruising the Adriatic Sea. In June 2025, Rama gave a toast at Alexander Soros’s Hamptons wedding to Huma Abedin. And while diplomats like then-U.S. Ambassador to Albania Yuri Kim cruised on Rama’s boat and, according to Albanian officials, accepted his gifts while rationalizing the imprisonment of his political rivals, Rama has transformed Albania in a way that reverses its democratic trajectory and will make it a regional liability for decades to come.
Perhaps the best way to understand Rama today is as a cross between the late Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Noriega was a longtime U.S. ally who rose through the ranks of the Panamanian Army before becoming the country’s military leader in 1983. Initially, the U.S. government and CIA embraced Noriega as a Cold War ally. By 1989, however, he had become an embarrassment due to his corruption, the blatancy of his criminality and abuse of democracy, and incontrovertible evidence of his links to South American drug cartels. On Dec. 20, 1989, then-President George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama to arrest Noriega. While the United Nations condemned the invasion, a CBS-New York Times poll of Panamanians reflected overwhelming support for it.
A range of Albanian politicians I interviewed in the United States, Greece, and Switzerland, including former members of Rama’s Socialist Party and former Prime Minister Sali Berisha’s Democratic Party, spoke about the “Marijuana-ization” of Albania’s economy. Albania was long an illegal cultivator of marijuana, but, in July 2023, Rama rammed through parliament a legalization bill. In theory, Albanian marijuana is medicinal; in reality, it fuels organized crime and money laundering. Illicit cultivation remains, but Rama’s government uses legalization to explain a collapse in seizures. Under Rama, Albania remains a major partner to and hub for Latin American cartels and their cocaine trade into Europe.
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There are also uncomfortable similarities between Rama and Erdoğan. Both men co-opted U.S. ambassadors who leveraged their positions into lucrative post-retirement contracts. As with Erdoğan, such contracts disproportionately benefit Rama, his cut-outs, or his cronies. Real estate development is particularly lucrative, and Rama — like Erdoğan — has used the power of the state to imprison and replace elected mayors who stand in his way.
One Albanian in the room told me that Erdoğan even counseled Rama that fraudulently winning the third election would set him up for lifetime rule. Rama also followed the Turkish president’s lead to use politicized auditors to imprison opposition and confiscate their property. The chief distance here is that Qatar bankrolled Erdoğan’s efforts and the U.S. Agency for International Development funded Albania’s auditors, ignoring their co-option by Rama.
USAID may be gone, but the blind support for Rama’s crackdown continues, fueled by lobbyists and laziness. There is no excuse for the Trump administration’s blindness; on Feb. 16, 2024, a U.S. District Court sentenced Chris McGonigal, a former FBI agent who supervised national security operations in New York, to two years in prison for taking a $225,000 bribe from a Rama intermediary. Just as Erdoğan uses fake dossiers as a tool for transnational repression, so too does Rama. The latest victim is former Deputy Prime Minister Arben Ahmetaj, who faces fake charges for refusing to be co-opted into Rama’s web of corruption, but whom Switzerland may deport to Albania based on fake U.S.-funded audits and Kim’s moral compromise.
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Strongmen may be the rage, but any bet on Rama will be as self-defeating as President Ronald Reagan’s bet on Noriega or former President Barack Obama’s embrace of Erdoğan. Whether it’s advancing drug cartels or terrorism, both Noriega and Erdoğan undercut U.S. interests. Rama represents the worst of both.
Americans will ultimately pay the price.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.