The European Commission is pushing for Albania and North Macedonia to be absorbed into the European Union.
“Albania and North Macedonia have shown a strong determination to advance on the EU path and achieved results that are concrete and must be irreversible,” claimed Federica Mogherini, the bloc’s grandiosely titled High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
“Based on that, today we recommend that the Council opens the accession negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia.”
Muslim-majority Albania is, despite its relatively secular national life, a hotbed for radical Islamic terrorism, supplying an outsized number of jihadist fighters to the Islamic State — as well as being a major centre of drug manufacturing and trafficking, arms and people-smuggling, and organised crime.
North Macedonia, which has struggled with corruption scandals and large-scale protests in recent years, is also home to a large number of ethnic Albanian jihadists, according to Greek media.
The West Balkan countries are also much poorer than most EU member-states, meaning there would likely be a major outflow of their populations to Western Europe if Free Movement migration rights were extended to them.
Even without Free Movement rights, Albanian gangsters are becoming an increasingly dominant force in the European Union’s organised crime scene, by taking advantage of the weak to non-existent border controls between European Union member-states — including the United Kingdom, which is outside the EU’s Schengen Area but must still allow foreigners with easily forged EU identity cards as well as proper passports through border control with very minimal vetting.
Street dealers in Britain attached to the so-called Hellbanianz — noted for their willingness to resort to extreme violence using weapons up to and including sub-machine guns — lead back to a more sophisticated Albanian mafia, thought to be allied to the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate and supplied by South American narco-lords.
The European Commission’s push for Albania to join the EU is likely to be unpopular with Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini — the national populist leader described as “the most important man in Europe” by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán — who recently won big in the EU Parliament elections.
“ALBANIA a new candidate state to join the European Union … In the face of history, the economy, the past and the future,” Salvini lamented in a 2014 social media post, when the Balkan state was being put on the path to accession talks.
“Let’s do an exchange? They come in, we go out… What do you say?”