Trump’s election maestro works to topple Albanian prime minister

The Republican strategist who guided Donald Trump’s 2024 political resurrection is helping Albania’s main opposition party stage an unlikely revival.

Trump’s campaign adviser and Republican election guru Chris LaCivita is now backing the conservative Democratic Party of Albania, whose leader Sali Berisha is hoping for his own political comeback from corruption allegations in Sunday’s high-stakes national election.

With LaCivita’s backing, Berisha is trying to topple Edi Rama, the painter-turned-socialist heavyweight who has held Albania in thrall for more than two decades, first as mayor of Tirana and then prime minister.

A victory for Berisha would bring an end to 12 years of rule by Rama’s Socialists, which international observers have described as a period marked by increased state capture by a single party. But it would also usher in a political force openly aligned with Trump’s agenda in a region long seen as being strategically vulnerable to Russian and Chinese influence.

“In the last two years, Chris LaCivita has advised two major political figures, in two different countries … those two cases are Donald Trump and Sali Berisha,” Democratic Party spokesperson Alfred Lela told POLITICO.

According to Lela, the two share “remarkably similar profiles … [they were] persecuted by establishments — domestic and international — targeted by their countries’ justice systems, and painted as dangerous underdogs who must be eliminated from politics at any cost.”

Sali Berisha is hoping for his own political comeback from corruption allegations. | Armando Babani/EPA

At an event earlier this year, LaCivita said “with a thriving democracy and true friendship with America, we can make Albania great again,” flashing a thumbs-up at the audience. POLITICO put a series of questions to LaCivita about his work in Albania for Berisha but did not receive a response.

Berisha, now 80 years old, is widely viewed as the father of Albanian democracy for his role in the protest movement that unseated Europe’s last hard-line communist regime in 1992 and for becoming the country’s first democratically elected president.

But he was targeted by the Joe Biden administration in 2021 over alleged corruption, kicking off three years of chaos in Albania’s Democratic Party during which Berisha was expelled from the parliamentary group and eventually placed under house arrest ahead of a graft probe — before a court finally handed control of the party back to him in 2024.

While surveys suggest the ruling Socialist Party could snag around 48 percent of the vote, and the Democrats trail by at least 10 percentage points, the introduction of diaspora voting for the first time and the low reliability of polling could yet lead to a surprise. The party that wins a parliamentary majority forms the new government and selects the prime minister.

This would represent a stunning electoral rebirth for Berisha, a man who once looked politically dead and buried.

US blacklist

By 2021, Berisha had been president, served two terms as prime minister, and had largely stepped back to let the next generation lead the Democratic Party.

Then came a shock from abroad: The U.S. declared him, his daughter and son-in-law persona non grata, with then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken citing “significant corruption” as the reason they were banned from entering the country.

The Biden administration said Berisha was involved in the “misappropriation of public funds and interfering with public processes … for his own benefit and to enrich his political allies and his family members at the expense of the Albanian public’s confidence in their government institutions and public officials.”

“Mr. Berisha demanded facts and evidence, as did several U.S. congressmen, but Secretary Blinken has never provided a single piece of proof,” Lela said when asked about the designation.

Albania is a fiercely pro-American country, and having the historic leader of the main opposition group blacklisted by the U.S. is akin to a political death sentence for the party in the eyes of many Albanians.

Enter the guru who helped propel Trump back to the White House after a successful 2024 campaign in which the maverick Republican won all seven swing states across the U.S.

“LaCivita has publicly stated that Berisha’s status did not deter him — it inspired him. He joined a difficult campaign, for a party trying to rebuild itself after being pushed to the edge of political execution,” Lela said.

Edi Rama, the painter-turned-socialist politician, has held Albania in thrall for more than two decades, first as mayor of Tirana and then prime minister. | Malton Dibra/EFE via EPA

Berisha — a cardiologist by training, who combines an intellectual veneer with fiery, combative politics — said the domestic corruption probe, in which charges were filed after his U.S. designation and house arrest, was a politically motivated attack.

He kicked off a protest movement, with demonstrators setting fire to tires outside Tirana’s city hall, burning parliament chairs and torching effigies of ruling party leaders.

Confined to his flat in central Tirana, Berisha had a microphone hoisted up to the eighth floor of his apartment building and addressed crowds through the window, making regular appearances until he was released from house arrest in September 2024.

Everyone’s courting Trump

Rama, who has been in power since 2013, has worked hard to woo the West — from showing up to Brussels meetings in sweatpants and sneakers, to treating curmudgeonly Eurocrats like royalty at glitzy conferences organized in Tirana.

Charismatic and often intentionally over the top, he has worked hard at making himself the West’s favorite Albanian to call.

He, too, enlisted the help of high-profile Western advisers, hiring Labour party strategist Alastair Campbell in 2012 to help him craft what ended up being a landslide victory in the 2013 election. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was later also involved in advising Rama.

And the Democrats aren’t the only ones courting Trump’s inner circle.

In an interview in April, Rama told Bloomberg that he considers Trump to be “good for everyone,” stating that “God saved Trump” after the July 2024 assassination attempt on the U.S. campaign trail “not only to make America great again … [but] also to make Europe wake up and get its act together.”

Rama also handed over one of the most lucrative development projects in the country’s modern history to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, including a 99-year-lease on the island of Sazan — a deserted former military intelligence base off the glittering southern coast of Albania — and land on the Vjosa River delta.

EU ambitions

The fraught political exchanges between Berisha’s Democrats and Rama’s Socialists risk hampering Albania’s EU accession ambitions, the single most important issue for voters.

“Their confrontational approach is what has kept the country from advancing to its full potential and on its EU integration path,” said Valbona Zeneli, a fellow at the Atlantic Council.

“We need a new wave of leaders and parties, and a break from voting for the party leader versus voting for political platforms and policies,” she continued.

Unlike most of its Balkan neighbors, which continue to be entangled in intractable disputes stemming from the Yugoslav disintegration wars of the 1990s, Albania faces little to no regional or international opposition to becoming an EU member — and has largely acted as a stabilizing factor in the region.

It is currently seen as a front-runner for EU membership alongside its northern neighbor Montenegro, with Rama pledging to secure accession by 2030 as part of his pitch to voters for Sunday’s election.

“This is what worries me most — after the elections, whether the divisions in the country will continue to slow its reform progress and the initiatives that could finally pull it out of this decades-long post-communist transition process,” Zeneli said.