Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama told European Parliament President Roberta Metsola on Thursday that “Karma is a bitch” — referring to the major corruption scandal that has rocked the institution in recent weeks.
Hinting at hypocrisy on corruption from countries already in the club — and the European Parliament itself — Rama suggested that the EU now requires higher standards from would-be joiners (like Albania) than its own members adhere to.
“More than half of the EU countries would not be able to enter the EU anymore,” Rama said speaking at a POLITICO panel event at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I am not talking about the former communists. I’m talking also about founders, believe me.”
The Parliament has been at the center of a sprawling probe into whether foreign governments, including Qatar and Morocco, illegally influenced its work. The inquiry has ensnared a former vice-president of the Parliament, a former MEP, a parliamentary assistant and an NGO boss and has thrown a harsh light on the institution’s procedures to deal with potential conflicts of interest.
Rama alleged that the accession process for candidate states is different from when countries like Malta, Metsola’s home country, became members of the bloc, saying that it has become “incredibly neurotic and an unfair thing.” Albania ranks 110th on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index below South Africa, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Metsola stressed that the Parliament “has been always extremely positive when it came to EU enlargement because a lot of us remember when we joined.”
But while Rama said his country was learning from the EU about how to build democratic institutions, he still had a feeling the EU was getting its comeuppance when the scandal erupted.
“Roberta, sorry, I have to say it, when this corruption case got out. I said: Karma is a bitch,” he said.
Earlier this month, Metsola announced 14 proposed reforms to the system to beef up the transparency rules for MEPs in the wake of the corruption scandal.
