Leku, world champion, has anyone seen VAR?

By Lutfi Dervishi

 
For several years, an argument has been repeated here: the euro is weakening because our economy is getting stronger. At first glance, the thesis sounds convincing. Today, one euro is exchanged for about 93-94 lekë, while in 2024 alone the euro lost 7.4% against the lek, and in 2025 another 2.8%, the fourth consecutive year with a historical record low.

But it is enough to look outside Albania for this story of our strong economy to waver.

The global euro paradox

If the euro were truly a free-falling currency, it should also be weakening against its other major trading partners. In reality, the opposite is true. Against the US dollar, the euro has needed more dollars for most of the period 2024-2026. The trend is the same for the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan: the euro is strengthening, not weakening.  
At the other end of the spectrum, the euro has strengthened to historic levels against the currencies of countries facing serious geopolitical or structural crises. Turkey is the most blatant example: today one euro buys about 53 liras, a country with an automotive, textile and military industry that exports drones to half the world, but its lira is falling because inflation and loss of confidence have brought it to its knees.

What about the neighbors?

Against the Serbian dinar and the Macedonian denar, the exchange rate has remained almost unchanged for years (these countries, it is true, follow fixed or strictly managed exchange rate policies). Against the Swedish and Norwegian krone, fluctuations have been within normal market ranges. Nowhere else in the region has this “miracle” been repeated.

The lek has strengthened more against the euro than the currencies of the G7 and more than the currencies of the Gulf countries, which have oil and gas reserves.

Who is keeping the money in shape?

The Bank of Albania itself has admitted that it is intervening, and not a little. In the first nine months of 2024 alone, foreign exchange interventions amounted to about 2.6% of GDP, almost triple the same period a year earlier. In 2024-2025, the Bank bought over 2 billion euros on the domestic market precisely to slow, not encourage, the strengthening of the lek. If the lek was simply “healthy,” why would anyone try to keep it on a diet?

According to the monetary authority, the explanation is "structural": the explosion of tourism, the increase in foreign investment in real estate, budget surpluses that reduce the supply of lek in the market. The Governor himself has not completely ruled out the role of informal foreign exchange inflows, a sentence uttered with the caution of someone walking on ice.

The question that needs an answer

These comparisons do not automatically mean that the lek is “artificially” strong. It could indeed be a combination of tourism, FDI and good luck. But when a currency of a country of 2.4 million simultaneously defies the logic of the dollar, the yen, the G7 and Gulf oil, and when the central bank itself spends billions of euros each year simply to rein it in, the phrase “structural coincidence” starts to sound like a very comfortable answer to a very strange phenomenon.

Until someone who is skilled and works for the good of the country shows us with accurate figures, source by source, where every euro that enters this small market comes from, the Albanian lek will remain the only one in the world that earns without working and strengthens without any explanation to convince those who have brains in their heads instead of husks.