Eddie Rama is an unusual prime minister. His desk is dotted with pastels, pencils and watercolors. The huge walls of his office are covered with hundreds of abstract images of his own creation. Two gray parrots are making noise in a cage in the lobby, the British newspaper The Times wrote about the Albanian Prime Minister.
For eight years, the Albanian government has not prevented the 57-year-old Rama from indulging in his artistic impulses - even more. The 195-cm-tall socialist politician once played basketball professionally and barely looked up from his latest surreal artwork when the newspaper's journalist entered his office.
He has been under a lot of pressure lately. Albania is emerging as a pro-Western foothold in the Balkans, as Russia and China benefit from the European Union's neglect of this flammable region.
As a result, Britain has begun courting Rama, hoping to increase investment in NATO member Albania and strengthen relations between the countries, which began a century ago.
These ties were virtually nil when the Communists ruled Tirana from World War II until 1991, but British warships are expected to visit the country this year to take part in joint military maneuvers.
Rama says he is on "good terms" with Boris Johnson. Both are former mayors of their capitals, a role the Albanian left his mark on when he ordered the dark communist-era buildings to be painted in bright and cheerful colors.
"They laugh well today," he said.
The British Prime Minister recently appointed Sir Stuart Peach, the former Chief Air Marshal who served as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander until last summer, as a special envoy to the region.
On Monday, Peach will meet with Albanian Foreign Minister Olta Jaka in Tirana to discuss growing tensions in the region.
Some Balkan countries, frustrated by the seemingly frozen expectation of EU membership, turned instead to Moscow and Beijing. However, Rama insists that decades of Albania's isolation under Enver Hoxha, its paranoid communist dictator, mean it can withstand the "temptation" to seek alternative geopolitical alliances.
Although Rama compared Albania's EU bid to Samuel Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot", whose protagonist never arrived, he pledged to join the bloc. "We are 100 percent committed to the Euro-Atlantic area. ", he said.
It was in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, 390 km north of Tirana, that a Serbian nationalist provoked World War I by shooting Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, in June 1914. Eighty years later, Yugoslav wars led to his death. 140,000 people, and the massacres then forced NATO to order its fighter jets to bomb Serbia. Most recently, Serbia applied for EU membership, but secured its bets by buying Russian fighter jets and tanks. Moscow, through its Serbian ally, is suspected of trying to destabilize Kosovo, a staunchly pro-Western country that is also seeking EU membership, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, another EU candidate.
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