TIRANA, Aug 30 /ATA/ Prime Minister Edi Rama is attending the GLOBSEC 2024 security forum. During a conversation on the topic picked by moderator Steve Clemons, “Region Under Siege: The Fragility of the Western Balkans”, held in Prague, Rama spoke about the importance of integrating the Western Balkans into the EU.
Rama said that, “For Albania it is very clear, we unequivocally want to join the EU, although we have unreservedly done everything we have committed ourselves to. Even when we went in the wrong direction all the time, we did it without reservation. We are not good Eurocrats, we are Europeans, but we are Albanians. We unreservedly want to become member of the EU. We are 100% aligned with EU foreign policy. Without any doubt we are NATO members, and without a doubt, we are against Russian aggression in Ukraine.”
According to Rama, “we are a country where it is generally very clear where we belong to wherever you go, from taxi driver to everyone else, while this is not the case for the whole region. Vladimir Putin’s popularity in Albania is between 1 and something around 1 percent, while there are other countries in the region where Vladimir Putin is more popular than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. The question is, how to get this whole club on board, how to bring it together and united and fully integrate it into the EU, which means, to fully integrate it with European principles and values, but also with the EU and certainly in the Euro-Atlantic way of approaching foreign relations and that is not an easy task.”
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