Prime Minister Edi Rama and French President Emmanuel Macron addressed the Future Investment Initiative (FII) International Forum today — a global platform that brings together political leaders and executives of the world’s largest corporations to discuss innovation, investment, and the future of the global economy. For the first time in Europe, the forum is being held in Albania.

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Prime Minister Edi Rama:
First of all, very much welcome to Tirana and let me start by thanking wholeheartedly Richard and Cecilia for having kept the promise to come back with many people. And here we are, while I’m very, very pleased to be together with a great leader, a very dear friend, the President of France, who comes to Tirana for the second time in 18 months, after no President came in more than 100 years.

Thank you, Mr President. And yes, I’m pleased, but I’m also terrified, because to make a speech right before Emmanuel is not the best thing you can have in life, because he knows how to speak.
He comes from a previous life where he had to deal with investors, with business people, with capital, while I come from a previous life where I had to deal with colors and exhibitions.

So Richard, you have put us in a very unfair competition, but I think it’s a way to start talking also about the unfair tariffs.

And before going further, I want to express my gratitude and also my big pleasure to a man that I admire, and he is so admired by everyone that his seat is between the President of France and the Prime Minister of Albania. So you can imagine the importance of the man.

And let me say it all, I somehow felt empowered when I heard Emmanuel saying, what are you doing in Tirana? This had to be in France first. So finally, we did something before France, which is a good start. And so I want to be very brief, which is not my forte, by the way, because in general Balkan leaders are long in their speeches. And after four elections, one and starting the fourth Monday, the risk of being even longer is very, very present. But I’m going to try to be short, and I want to say that we are very proud of what we have achieved so far. Trust me, nobody would have imagined what is happening today, what happened yesterday. And I’m not talking about the imagination of 100 years ago. I’m talking about the imagination of 10 years ago or 5 years ago. So we have come a long way, and now we witness the results of the change we are making happen. And it’s both satisfying and terrifying because the responsibility is much bigger, and the demand to perform at the highest level is increasing every day.

Yesterday, we had a fantastic European Political Community Summit and we realised how complicated it is to organize such a big event. But I think we did it well. And while in the western part of Europe they’ve done so many events of that kind, so at the end they think that the guests deserve just some cold catering food. We tried to be at the top of the cuisine to make them feel how important they are, and I’m sure we succeeded.

So we are here today to try and convey the message that this country wants more and this country needs more people to trust in us. And the good thing about Albania is that, as you see, we are also good friends with many and we feel blessed to be able to say that we are strategic partners of the EU, of the United States, but we feel also very blessed to say that we are close partners to Saudi Arabia, to UAE, to the Gulf countries. And by the way, we follow with admiration what is happening in these countries, the vision, the drive, the ambition of His Highness Mohammed bin Salman and of the President of UAE, Mohammed bin Zayed and so on.

So we are in a good place to try and learn from different realities, different paths of life, and to do the utmost to make the best out of it. And now we are aware also that the time we live in is complicated, and I checked in Webster where the trendiest word is polarisation. And the definition of polarisation is a verb dating back to the early 1800s, originally describing light waves. And for the Collins Dictionary, the number one word was era, a particular time in someone’s life or a specific career of a unique character. And era is in the closing of an era or the beginning of a new one. But beyond analogies, I believe and continue to believe with all my strength that when Donald Trump says that God saved him because he has a plan for America, he’s saying just half of the truth. I believe that the other half of the truth is that God saved him because he has a plan for Europe, too.

I want to share with you the belief that when I heard the United States President speak about a golden age coming, I sensed that, wishing all the best to the United States, of course, a golden era can open for Europe also. And it will be all about how farsighted we’ll be and how much able we’ll be to think out of the box and to understand that in this world where everyone, everyone else is doing the unthinkable, Europe cannot just continue to think as it used to think before this moment appeared in our life. Europe also can and should think about doing the unthinkable.

And I believe it’s not very difficult to understand what the unthinkable might be, how the unthinkable might look like. And the experience is all there, the culture of change, the need to change, and we can open an incredible era for Europe.

So, dear Emmanuel and dear friends,

I was so happy to think that this forum could come here also for another reason, because after having done some research to make my knowledge about the forum, what I realised is that this is the standard of the effort to think differently. And I am fully committed to everything that can come out of it, and for everyone who can have the feeling that should come back to Albania and to invest and to stay.

To conclude, I want to tell you something that Emmanuel will maybe not be very happy to hear, but I have to share it with you. We opened with thanks to his help and to the help of some other leaders, the new branch of the College of Europe in Tirana. It was a great decision that followed practically the previous decision to open the second branch because the original is in Bruges, not only in Poland in the early 90s to help the new countries emerging from behind the wall to join Europe.
So, for us, it was amazing. But you know what’s happening, we have students from all over Europe and the students coming from the old Europe want to stay and work in Tirana. No French student wants to go back to France, Emanuele. And I very much hope that you’ll not be blamed by your opposition that it’s you behind their drive to stay in Tirana by coming so often to Tirana.
So thank you very much again. I want to escape this floor and not enter into the merit of all the deep subjects that Richard offered to us in the presentation, because there is someone else who knows exactly what to say and what to do about the deep subjects. And the only thing that I think I’m doing very well is to stay close to this man and to learn from him as much as I can and to take advantage of his friendship as much as I can for Albania and not for myself, of course, and to feel blessed to lead this country in a moment in time when Emanuele Macron leads his.

So thank you very much.

Thank you, Prime Minister. Yes. In fact, we cannot have you on stage and not ask you a very important question. Thank you for hosting FII in Tirana, because it’s just a day after this great EPC summit. What happened yesterday?

Can you share with us what the main outcomes were and what was discussed?

Prime Minister Edi Rama: First of all, don’t thank me for hosting because what we do, we Albanians do as a first profession, is to host.
So if we would not be asked to host, we would be jobless. So hospitality in Albania is our uniting religion.

We are here, Muslims, Christians, in full harmony, Pope Francis. Be blessed. When he came here, he said, ‘’This is not harmony, this is fraternity, religious fraternity. And each one has its own way to look at God. But all of us have a very common conviction that is sealed in our first common law in the Middle Ages, which says the house of the Albanian belongs to God and the guest.
So as far as God doesn’t show up, guests show up on his behalf. So you are a God, Richard, today. If you were alone with Cecilia, you would be the only God and Goddess.

But having Emmanuel here, you have to share the place of God with some other gods. But also everyone else here that has come should feel like God, because this is how our common law at that time explains the knock at the door. The knock at the door is the will of God. So you have to open. And whoever is behind has to be welcomed. Even your enemy has to be welcomed. And you cannot touch him. And if he wants to stay at your home, you have to keep him at home. And you cannot touch him. You can hate him as much as you can, but you cannot say it.bAnd so it’s just – and I truly believe it – it’s just our big honour to host you, to host the forum, to host all the guests that are here. And we’ll do our best to make you come back. And yesterday, it happened exactly something similar happened, you know. Gods came from all over Europe, and we hosted this EPC, which was originally launched as an idea by Emmanuel.

I believe, because of being an old French idea, going back to Abbe de Saint-Pierre, who offered the world that incredible treaty for perpetual peace. And if one would sit down and say, okay, let’s think, what is the unthinkable for Europe?

I think that the Treaty of Abbe de Saint-Pierre is the best start. It’s very simple. How Europe can guarantee perpetual peace. And then when I supported the idea of EPC, many people, many countries who were not okay with that in the beginning, who thought that this is the typical French trick to offer a different type of cheese while not wanting to give you the cheese you are asking, which is EU enlargement, thought that I was somehow coming out, after so many years having left France, as a French recruited asset, and working on behalf of the president to sabotage the enlargement and to push for this EPC. But in fact, it was the sixth summit, and this changed. And I believe the aggression of Ukraine has made everyone realise that this format is very much beneficial to everyone because it gathers the big democratic Europe, from Great Britain to Turkiye, from Switzerland to Azerbaijan and Armenia. And by the way, we were very pleased yesterday to see that Azerbaijan and Armenia are just one very small step to finalising the historical peace agreement. And so, now, to see all this happen in Tirana is absolutely amazing.

There was only one thing that we couldn’t manage because in the morning of the day before, we had Sir Keir Starmer coming from Britain for a bilateral visit, which was the first bilateral visit in the history of a British prime minister, and he brought so much rain with him.

So the whole day yesterday was under the clouds of British politics, and you see today, you see today, there is sun.

French President Emmanuel Macron: Mr Prime Minister, dear Edi, thank you so much for your hospitality indeed, but also your friendship. Yes, we are so happy to have you.

Edi delivered very important messages, and I do agree with them, and I don’t want to repeat. But I just wanted to say a few words, perhaps about our Europe, but also answer all the questions you have. Because the moment we are living in is quite chaotic in a certain way, and I think it’s very important to have a clear strategy for France, for Europe, and for this larger Europe, which is today what we have in the European political community. And perhaps to answer your questions on our journey, if I may say, and the relationship as well with the US, China and so on.
But my conviction for the European strategy in this context is that we have to take this opportunity to accelerate and have a clear strategy of competitiveness, investment as a top priority, and become a power. And I will revert on that. We need a big acceleration and competitiveness is critical. But this competitiveness should first be based on simplification. We have to streamline our regulations in order to resynchronize with the rest of the world. And this is one of the top priorities we have.

The second point is a deepening of the single market. We have to deal with many regulations, and it’s still too complicated for a lot of players to deal with the European markets. And our strength is the fact that the European Union is a market of millions of participants, and it’s not seen and played by, I would say, entrepreneurs like that. So the deepening of the single market is just taking advantage of the taxation we are putting on ourselves. Indeed, we have the tariffs, and we can revert to that if you want. But we put tariffs on ourselves with our regulations in the single market. So this is the second point.

The third one is that we have to create now a single market on three critical sectors where it was excluded from the very beginning: telco, energy, and finance. It was not part of the single market. But now we have to create a single market for these sectors, because this is the best way to integrate our model, have much more capacity to invest, and deploy an actual financial place. And part of this agenda is the capital market union, which is one of our top priorities and an area of strong convergence between Germany and France. Because we do believe that we have – and it’s on top of the fact that we underuse our single market, but we are underusing our own savings. If you take the savings of the world – and I put the Gulf apart, given the structure today of your economy – but even if you compare us with China, etc, we have much more savings.

But the problem is that all these savings are put in institutions that we have overregulated, not to invest in equity and innovation. And this is, I would say, the beauty for other continents of the past 50 years. Because of a financial crisis, which came from market players in the US, we decided collectively to overregulate financial institutions in Europe. But this is the clear outcome of the last 15 years. And we put with solvency a series of layers of regulation on these key players, which are critical for the financing of the European economy.

75% of our financing goes to banks and insurance. And through these regulations, we just stop their capacity to finance innovation and equity. And this gap in innovation and equity is the first explanation of the gross difference between the US and Europe.

So, on top of simplification, deepening of the single market and this acceleration, we have to create this capital market union, meaning we have to re-synchronise our regulation with the US on banks and insurance. And we have clearly to re-channel our savings to be sure that they go to the right place, meaning the right locations and the right sectors. It’s key. Here is for me the top priority of the European Union. And everything is about speed and our capacity to deliver this agenda as soon as we can and with the right magnitude, the right scale.

The second point is that our Europe has to invest in three top priorities: green tech, AI, and defence and security. And these three areas will require much more public and private investment. This is why we will have to reshape our common budget, because we need much more common financing. But we will also have to deploy much more capacity of the private sector to go into these critical areas.

And my third point, when I spoke about becoming a power, is linked to the first two. We are in a moment of truth. And reverting to this intuition of Edi that it’s not just for the US that Donald Trump’s policy could be good news, but it’s as well for the Europeans, I’m sure about that. I’m a strong believer in this European strategic autonomy or independence. Not to say I believe in autarky, it doesn’t make sense. But I think we have to choose our partnership, and we have to reduce our dependencies. And through the COVID time, through the Ukrainian-Russian war in Ukraine, and as the energy crisis and so on, we experienced the cost of dependencies.
And now the question for us is, do we want to become an economic and financial power, a green and AI power, and a geopolitical power with the capacity to protect itself?

This is the question raised to the Europeans. The answer has to be yes, for sure. But this is a new phase of the European journey. First, we mutualise the key elements, I mean, coal and steel, which were the basis to make war, to avoid, I would say, the domestic war in Europe. Second, we created a market in the 80s. Now we would have to create a geopolitical power. And this is our agenda.

I just want to add one point about the European political community and the importance of Albania in such an agenda. I strongly believe that beyond the European Union, we have this larger Europe, with Norway, the UK, the Western Balkans, and Ukraine.

The reality of Europe is that this is a place of more than 650 million inhabitants, who are absolutely not taken into consideration. Consideration, neither from a geopolitical point of view nor from a financial or economic point of view. Let’s better integrate this place. Let’s deal together on energy, on migration, on defence, on trade. If we coordinate this place with very stable countries, without wars and destabilisation, if we better integrate this place beyond the EU enlargement, and I’m a strong believer and advocate of the EU accession for your country, you know it, for 2027, because you are doing the reform, but beyond that, we have a huge opportunity to gather these 700 million inhabitants and make it a place to be respected by all the others. And it’s a unique opportunity.

And let me just say in a few words, it’s great to have you in Europe. I know that you come from different parts of the world. This is a stable and reliable place. And in this crazy world, don’t underestimate the strengths of such qualities.

And I’m very happy you are here, beyond our jokes with Prime Minister Edi Rama. Because here in Albania, you have the entry point in this region of the Western Balkans, but much more broadly. And it’s a key point in the Mediterranean region in Europe. So I do encourage you to invest in Albania, because you have strong leadership. And I’m not just speaking because he’s my friend, because he delivered already.
And in two years to come, as he has now claimed, he will join the EU. And it will be key. Second, I want you to know and to be sure that we will deliver as Europeans. Now, there is a strong alignment between Germany and France. We will gather our colleagues to deliver the agenda I mentioned clearly.

So, please invest in Europe. Please do believe in Europe. Because we need your trust, your investment, to deliver this very ambitious agenda. Because I think this is the right one as well. Not just for the Europeans, but all the other regions to create much more stability.

Thank you very much.