The Albanian presidency is one of the most misunderstood institutions in the country’s politics, especially from the outside. American readers raised on a strong executive presidency tend to assume the title carries similar weight in Tirana. It does not. The President of Albania (Presidenti i Republikës së Shqipërisë) is the head of state in a parliamentary republic — a role closer in shape to the German Bundespräsident or the Italian Presidente della Repubblica than to the American Oval Office. The day-to-day government runs through the Prime Minister and the Kuvendi, the unicameral Albanian Parliament.
That does not make the office unimportant. The president is the constitutional officer who promulgates laws, sends them back when they need a second look, appoints judges on the proposals of the High Judicial Council, signs treaties, and represents the republic at home and abroad. In quiet years, the role is largely symbolic. In contested ones — and Albania has had several — the president becomes the closest thing the system has to a constitutional referee, and the choice of who holds the office matters more than the ceremonial calendar suggests.
What follows is a diaspora-side overview of the institution: how the president is elected, what the office actually does, who has held it since the transition from communism, and where the role sits relative to the Prime Minister. It companions our broader explainer on whether Albania is a democracy and our background on Albania-US relations.
The office, in one paragraph
Article 86 of the 1998 Constitution makes the President of the Republic the head of state and the symbol of the unity of the people. The president is elected by the Kuvendi for a five-year term, renewable once. The office is non-partisan in the formal sense — on election the president must suspend membership in any political party, although in practice every Albanian president has been a known political figure before taking office. The president is not a member of the government, does not chair the Council of Ministers, and does not direct ministries. Real executive authority lies with the Prime Minister and the cabinet. The president’s powers are mostly promulgatory, ceremonial, and appointive, with a small set of consequential reserve powers that are exercised only at moments of constitutional friction.
How the president is elected
Albania does not elect its president by popular vote. The choice belongs to the Kuvendi, which has 140 deputies elected by proportional representation across the 12 qarqe (regional districts) for four-year terms. The constitutional procedure for electing a president is laid out in Article 87 and is designed to push parliament toward consensus before falling back on majoritarian rules.
The procedure runs in up to five rounds:
- Rounds one, two, and three: require a three-fifths supermajority — 84 of 140 deputies. The intent is to force the parliamentary majority and the opposition to agree on a candidate the whole chamber can accept.
- Round four: if no candidate reaches 84 votes in the first three rounds, the threshold drops to a simple majority of all members — 71 of 140.
- Round five: a final simple-majority round.
If no candidate is elected after the fifth round, the Kuvendi is automatically dissolved and new legislative elections are held. That dissolution clause is what keeps the supermajority requirement meaningful — without it, the majority could simply outwait the opposition.
In practice, almost every Albanian president since 1998 has been elected in the fourth or fifth round, with the opposition either boycotting the vote or refusing to back the majority’s candidate. The supermajority requirement has shaped the choice in a different way: ruling parties have tended to pick candidates the opposition could live with on a personal level (a respected jurist, a senior military officer, an academic) rather than figures from the front line of partisan politics.
There is no minimum age in the modern constitution beyond Albanian citizenship by birth and at least ten years’ residence in Albania. The president cannot hold any other public office, party position, or commercial role during the term.
What the president actually does
The constitutional powers of the office fall into four buckets: promulgation, appointments, representation, and reserve powers. Each is narrower than its American counterpart.
Promulgation. Every law passed by the Kuvendi is sent to the president for signature. The president can sign and promulgate, or return the law once to parliament for reconsideration within 20 days — a suspensive veto, not an absolute one. If parliament re-passes the law by a simple majority, the president is obliged to sign. The veto has been used periodically, most notably during periods of cohabitation between a president and an opposing parliamentary majority. It is a delaying instrument and a public-position-taking instrument, not a blocking instrument.
Appointments. The president formally appoints the Prime Minister-designate (in practice, the leader of the parliamentary majority), members of the Constitutional Court and the High Court (on proposals of the relevant constitutional bodies after justice reform), the chair of the High Judicial Council, the Attorney General, the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, ambassadors, and a number of other senior officials. Most of these appointments are formal — the president signs on the proposals of constitutional bodies or the government — but a few carry discretion. The post-2016 justice reform redistributed many appointment powers away from the president and toward independent vetting and selection bodies.
Representation. The president is the formal face of the republic abroad. State visits, accreditation of foreign ambassadors, ratification of treaties (alongside parliament), and ceremonial speeches at moments of national significance — 28 Nëntori (Independence Day), the anniversary of the founding of the modern army, state funerals — run through the office.
Reserve powers. The president is commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, declares mobilization and a state of war when the country is attacked (with parliamentary ratification), can call referendums on constitutional issues, grants pardons, and grants Albanian citizenship by decree in defined cases. The commander-in-chief role is formal in peacetime — the Armed Forces report to the Minister of Defense and the government — but becomes substantive in a true national-security emergency.
The current president: Bajram Begaj
General Bajram Begaj has been the eighth president of post-communist Albania since 24 July 2022. He was elected on 4 June 2022 in the fourth round of voting, with 78 votes in favor, after the first three rounds failed to reach the 84-vote supermajority. The Socialist Party majority under Prime Minister Edi Rama nominated him; the Democratic Party opposition boycotted the vote.
Begaj is the first career military officer to hold the Albanian presidency. He was born in 1967 in the south of the country and trained as a military physician. He rose through the Albanian Armed Forces over more than three decades, served on NATO-affiliated missions, and held the post of Chief of the General Staff of the Albanian Armed Forces from 2020 until his election. He is not a career party politician, which was the explicit selling point of his candidacy: the Socialist Party framed him as a non-partisan, internationally credible head of state in keeping with the constitution’s expectation that the president stand outside party politics.
His presidency has been, by design, low-profile. He has used the office’s promulgation and ceremonial functions on a regular cadence, has avoided the public confrontations with the government that characterized his predecessor’s term, and has emphasized Albania’s NATO membership and EU-accession path in his public posture. His five-year term runs until 2027.
Recent past presidents
The presidents of the Republic of Albania since the transition from communism are, in order:
- Ramiz Alia (1991–1992). The last communist-era head of state, who oversaw the legalization of opposition parties in December 1990, the first multi-party elections in March 1991, and the formal end of the People’s Socialist Republic. He resigned after the Democratic Party’s landslide win in March 1992.
- Sali Berisha (1992–1997). The first non-communist president. A cardiologist by training and one of the founders of the Democratic Party in December 1990. His presidency ended early during the 1997 unrest, which followed the collapse of the pyramid schemes. He later returned to politics as Prime Minister (2005–2013).
- Rexhep Meidani (1997–2002). A physicist and academic, elected after Berisha’s resignation. He oversaw the adoption of the 1998 Constitution by referendum on 22 November 1998 — the document that still governs the office today.
- Alfred Moisiu (2002–2007). A retired general and former Minister of Defense. He was elected as a consensus figure between the Socialist majority and the Democratic opposition. His presidency coincided with the beginning of Albania’s NATO accession process.
- Bamir Topi (2007–2012). A veterinary scientist and Democratic Party deputy. He was elected after multiple rounds in 2007. His term covered Albania’s NATO accession in April 2009 and its formal EU candidate-status application.
- Bujar Nishani (2012–2017). A lawyer and former Minister of Interior and Minister of Justice from the Democratic Party. His term was marked by tense cohabitation with the Socialist-led government that took office in 2013.
- Ilir Meta (2017–2022). Originally a founder of the Socialist Movement for Integration (LSI). His presidency was notable for an extended public confrontation with the Rama government, the use of the suspensive veto more frequently than any predecessor, and an unsuccessful impeachment attempt by the Kuvendi in 2021 that did not produce removal. He left office at the end of his term in July 2022.
- Bajram Begaj (2022–present). See above.
Several of these biographies share a pattern that is informative on its own: the Albanian presidency has been a destination for senior figures from outside front-line politics — academics, generals, doctors — more often than for party leaders themselves. The party leaders, with few exceptions, have preferred the Prime Minister’s office.
President vs. Prime Minister: who actually runs Albania?
This is the single most useful institutional fact for an outside reader. The Prime Minister runs the government. The President does not.
Albania is a parliamentary republic. The Council of Ministers — the cabinet — sets policy, drafts legislation, runs the budget, directs the ministries, and is responsible to the Kuvendi by a vote of confidence. The Prime Minister is the head of that government, drawn from the party or coalition that commands a parliamentary majority. Since September 2013 the office has been held by Edi Rama of the Socialist Party, re-elected with parliamentary majorities in 2017, 2021, and 2025 — making him the longest continuously serving head of government in modern Albanian history.
The president, by contrast, has no ministry, no policy portfolio, and no budget authority. The president cannot direct the police, the tax authority, the foreign ministry, or any other arm of the state in the way an American president can. The president can refuse to sign a law once, can refuse to formally appoint an official on a technical legality argument, and can speak publicly with the moral weight of the office — but cannot govern.
Where the president’s role does become substantively important is in moments of constitutional friction: a contested election, an impeachment attempt, a dispute between parliament and the Constitutional Court, or a defense emergency. In those moments the office becomes a constitutional referee whose interpretation of its own powers matters, because the only check on it is the same Kuvendi that elected the holder. That is why the constitutional drafters built in the three-fifths supermajority requirement: to keep the office, at least at the moment of election, somewhat above the day’s majority.
The president and the diaspora
For the Albanian diaspora in the United States, the office of the president touches the community in two specific ways.
The first is representation. The president is the figure who carries the formal voice of the Albanian state on visits to Washington, on ceremonial occasions involving the diaspora (annual 28 Nëntori events, anniversaries, commemorations), and in messages directed at Albanians abroad. The substance of bilateral policy is usually carried by the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, and the Albanian Embassy in Washington and Consulate in New York — but the symbolic weight of a presidential visit or a presidential message is real, and the office has historically been used to address the diaspora directly on questions of language, heritage, and recognition.
The second is citizenship by decree. Most diaspora applicants for Albanian citizenship go through the administrative path under Law No. 113/2020 — citizenship by descent, up to the great-grandparent, processed through the consular network. That is the relevant path for almost everyone. (See our 2020 Citizenship Law explainer for the procedure.) Alongside that ordinary route, the constitution preserves the president’s authority to grant Albanian citizenship by decree in specific cases — usually as a recognition of contribution to Albania’s international image, culture, sport, or science.
The most cited recent example is the pop artist Dua Lipa. On 19 October 2022, then-President Ilir Meta granted her Albanian citizenship by decree in recognition of her work and her public identification with Albanian heritage. Earlier in 2022, presidential decrees granted Albanian citizenship to the actor Eliza Dushku and to other public figures of Albanian descent born outside the country. These decrees are rare, are not a substitute for the descent-based route, and are not a programmatic policy. They do, however, illustrate that the office is constitutionally connected to the Albanian state’s recognition of the diaspora.
Why this matters for Albanian Americans
For most Albanian Americans, the daily relevance of the Albanian presidency is low. The office does not set immigration rules, does not run consular services, does not direct economic policy, and does not write the citizenship law. Those questions sit with the Council of Ministers and the Kuvendi.
What the office does provide is a stable, constitutionally defined head of state — a single point of formal representation for the Albanian republic abroad — and a small set of constitutional reserve powers that become important in exactly the moments when the rest of the political system is under stress. That is by design. The drafters of the 1998 Constitution, drawing on the painful experience of the inter-war monarchy, the communist one-party state, and the volatile early 1990s, deliberately built a parliamentary system with a weak president and a strong parliamentary executive. The cost is that the office can feel ceremonial. The benefit is that no single official can capture the state by capturing one office.
For an Albanian American reading the news from Tirana, the practical takeaway is simple. When a political dispute centers on the president — a veto, an impeachment attempt, a refusal to sign — the underlying conflict is almost always between the parliamentary majority and the opposition, with the president acting as the visible referee. Reading the office that way usually clarifies the story.
For deeper context on the constitutional framework that governs the office, see our companion explainer on whether Albania is a democracy, and on the 1990–1992 transition in our Albanian history overview. Common reader questions are answered in the FAQ at the top of the page.
The National Albanian Registry is a 501(c)(3) community-led count of Albanians in America. Granting citizenship by presidential decree is the rare path; counting and connecting the diaspora is the everyday one. If you are Albanian or of Albanian descent and live in the United States, you can get counted in two minutes — the Registry exists so the community has its own numbers, independent of any government.