Prime Minister Edi Rama has found someone else to blame except himself for the lack of progress in terms of opening the accession negotiations with the EU. Until recently, the Prime Minister accused the opposition for blocking the vetting, whereas nowadays he is accusing the EU of prejudices against Albania.
In a speech held on September 11 during the first session of the new Parliament, he stated:
[The opening] of negotiations next year is what Albania expects and deserves and it is unfair that this issue continues to be dragged along for reasons that have no relation to Albania, bringing up at every turn new reasons.
Now has come up – they don’t say it officially, I cannot say it – but it has come up and is going around, the fantasma of “ethnically Albanian crime.” Of course in certain media and urged on by certain sources and forces, but the issue is how and how much this also will turn into a sort of conditionality of the sort “first solve the problem of ethnically Albanian crime, then we’ll see.”
Being one of the “certain media” who covered the Dutch and French concerns with the rise in Albanian criminal activity in those countries and the possible return of the visa regime – a decision that is made independently of the EU accession process –, we would like to remind the Prime Minister of his speech held on November 29, 2016, during a meeting with veterans on Liberation Day:
Now it is clear that not Brussels, but our opposition has raised a wall that obstructs the negotiations, by blocking the vetting.
I would like to call upon all Pd members to exert pressure on the leadership and those deputies of the PD to take away the wall and fulfill the only condition for the opening of the negotiations, the vetting.
