Dear reader,
Wishing you a happy New Year and welcome to our first 2020 newsletter!
Croatia will work to restart European Union membership talks with Albania and North Macedonia while the country holds the EU presidency for the next six months.
“We will do our best to overcome problems and unblock the process that was held back at the summit in October 2019,” Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on January 2, 2020 a day after Croatia took up its first term in the rotating presidency.
Albania on the US air- strike in Iraq
The Official Tirana welcomed on January 4. the United States attack against Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani. “We stand firm with the U.S. and hope everyone does so,” Prime Minister Edi Rama said.
We stand strongly with U.S. in reacting to Iran’s activities in the Middle East and fighting violent extremists like Soleimani. Albania supports U.S. defensive strikes and actions to defend democracy, peace and stability,” Acting Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Gent Cakaj said on twitter.
Albania from today chairs the OSCE.
VIENNA – Albania has officially taken over the OSCE Presidency today, which will run through 2020. Edi Rama arrived today in the office of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office in Vienna, where he was received by OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger. Edi Rama considered this a historic moment for Albania. ” It is a very important day. I am very proud and have a very good cooperation. Here we have a very good team with people of different nationalities“Rama said. Afterwards, the Albanian Prime Minister spoke and presented Albania’s program and priorities to the OSCE Permanent Council.
List of Danish companies operating i Albania – conditions and barriers.
A lot of space for improvement. Click on picture or here…
If you want to get an interesting glimpse of Albanian, especially economic, history we recommend you to click on the picture.
e-Albania 2020!!
Prime Minister Edi Rama on 2019:
In a TV interview on Saturday January 4, Prime Minister Edi Rama said that 2019 was the most difficult year for him as Prime Minister and that his cabinet’s priorities for 2020 were topped by the post-earthquake reconstruction effort, closely followed by the uncompromising fight against crime. He said that the goal was to rebuild within 2020 all the houses and school buildings destroyed by the 26 November earthquake. He said that in 2019 the opposition had committed political suicide by leaving parliament and refusing to participate in the local government elections. He said that what happened to the extra-parliamentary opposition would serve as a lesion to other political forces in Albania not to commit the same errors of boycotting the institutions, blackmailing them, or abandoning the dialogue table.
This is how the non-parliamentarian Albanian opposition – DP and LSI – proposes to speed up the Albanian economy:
Reducing the price of energy, fuel, gas and other taxes we pay as citizens, coupled with increased salaries and pensions and the creation of new jobs, will increase the purchasing power of citizens. The small business would pay 0.5% of turnover tax up to ALL 140 million (= 1,1 Mio. Euro) and would benefit from a social security reduction of 9% from 15% today.
A message from the new EU-commission:
Financial Times: Albania – one of nine top recommended 2020 destinations
“Montenegro was the star of 2019 but the whole region is on the rise,” says Jonny Bealby of Wild Frontiers, who reports bookings for 2020 up 15 per cent compared with the same point a year ago.
“Visitors are drawn to the mountains, canyons and rivers, the sparkling coastline, ancient towns, Greek and Roman ruins, Ottoman citadels and rural hospitality.” Trekkers are finding the Accursed Mountains in the north of the country — off limits during the country’s years of communist isolationism and during the Kosovo war — offer an alternative to the Alps with almost no-tourist development.
Meanwhile, historical tours are taking growing numbers beyond the Unesco World Heritage site of Butrint to explore the numerous Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman sites throughout the country. And, on a totally different note, the Kala music festival, a week-long seaside party on the southern coast at Dhërmi, is putting Albania on the map for young travellers, in the same way events such as the Garden, Outlook and Sonus festivals did for Croatia.
It is a measure of the Albanian authorities’ enthusiasm for tourism that prime minister Edi Rama attended the first Kala festival in 2018. “People think of it as a place where you get robbed or killed,” Rama told a poolside press conference, The Guardian reported. “But the stigma has helped us. When someone visits and gets out alive, they realise it’s paradise!” The figures appear to back him up: foreign visitor numbers for the first 11 months of 2019 topped 6.1m, up 8.3 per cent on the same period in 2018.
That´s all for now,
sincerely,
Hans-Georg Nielsen
Albanian Honorary Consul
PS. This newsletter is mainly sent to relevant Danish and Albanian authorities, to Danes who have shown interest in Albania, to Albanians living in Denmark and to the friends and contacts of the consulate.
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