Edi Rama has pulled off another media coup to get the word out about Albania. On Saturday, December 21, the flamboyant prime minister of this small Balkan country announced that he was going to shut down TikTok for at least a year following the death, in mid-November, of a Tirana teenager following a brawl sparked off on social media. A world first, this decision was taken without any real evidence that the conflict between young people had originated on the Chinese social media network, and was immediately described as dictatorial by its opponents.

But that doesn't matter to Rama, who has ruled Albania since 2013 and loves making headlines in the international press with his iconoclastic decisions. Over the past few months, "people have been talking about what I've done," this tall, dark-haired 60-year-old was delighted to tell Le Monde in his offices at the end of October, when some of his initiatives had already begun to attract attention, such as his idea to create a Bektachi state – a Muslim brotherhood – in the heart of Tirana, his controversial agreement with Italy to welcome asylum seekers on its soil or his project to transform an Albanian island into a luxury hotel financed by Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

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