Sali Berisha

Who is Sali Berisha?

Prof. Dr. Sali Berisha, is an Albanian cardiologist and politician who served as President of Albania from 1992 to 1997 and Prime Minister from 2005 to 2013. He was also the leader of the Democratic Party of Albania twice, from 1991 to 1992 and then again from 1997 to 2013. To date, Berisha is the longest-serving democratically-elected leader and the only President of Albania elected to a second term.

Berisha was already a prominent intellectual in 1990 when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he called for the abolition of the one-party state and transition to democracy. A former secretary of the committee of the Party of Labor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tirana, he abandoned his career as a cardiologist and university professor to become the leader of the Democratic Party in the 1990s. From 1992, after the fall of communism, he served as the President of Albania until his government collapsed in 1997 in the wake of the collapse of notorious pyramid schemes. From 1997 to 2005, Albania was governed by the Socialist Party for two mandates, while he stayed in opposition.

In 2005, the Democratic Party won the general elections, and he became the Prime Minister after his coalition formed the new government. In 2009, he was re-elected Prime Minister, after the Democrats obtained a narrow win in the general elections but were forced into a coalition with the Socialist Movement for Integration through not winning enough seats on its own for the first time since the start of multi-party democracy in 1991.