Charged with corruption, money laundering and concealment of wealth, ex-politician Monika Kryemadhi is rebranding herself as a showbiz celebrity on the Big Brother reality show, but can it keep her out of prison?
Search the words ‘Monika Kryemadhi’ on social media in Albania, and one might expect to see the latest on the former politician’s legal troubles. Instead, the more likely results are short clips from Big Brother VIP.
Twice weekly, Kryemadhi, ex-wife of former Albanian President Ilir Meta and a political force in her own right for the past three decades, appears as a commentator on the Albanian edition of Big Brother VIP, shown on Top Channel.
Kryemadhi, 51, took the job in December last year, right at the time she was charged with corruption, money laundering and concealment of wealth alongside Meta.
Communications experts say the Big Brother gig represents an attempt by Kryemadhi to divert public attention away from the accusations against her, but they doubt it can influence the outcome of her current troubles.
“Before social media and reality TV, knowledge was power; today, power is the influence built not through policy debates or judicial processes, but through constant exposure and narrative control,” said Edlira Gjoni, a communications expert based in Canada.
“Still, these so called ‘parasocial interactions’ have their own limits,” Gjoni told BIRN. “Reality shows cannot feed endless empathy, normalise controversies, or influence judicial outcomes. They operate in a parallel universe, useful for shaping personal perceptions but, ultimately, do not hold any power over the political discourse and justice settings.”
Kryemadhi, however, said it was not her idea, and she does not consider it “a long-term commitment”.
“The proposal to be part of Big Brother came from Top Channel and it was not something I had asked for,” she told BIRN. “I accepted it because, after many years in politics, I don’t feel the need to see everything through a political filter. I have chosen to give myself the freedom to do things that I like and that challenge me in other ways.”
“I have never been a person who follows the expectations of others, and this does not change even now. On the contrary, I believe that the public values authenticity more than predetermined roles.”
‘Visibility a resource’
Meta has been active in politics since the dying days of the communist regime in Albania, after which he and Kryemadhi were both part of the Socialist Party, now in power for the past 13 years under Edi Rama.
Married in 1998, in 2004 they founded the Socialist Movement for Integration, SMI, which played second fiddle to both the Socialists and its main rivals, the Democrats, in various governments until 2017.
Already a former prime minister, Meta became Albanian president that year, ceding the SMI leadership to his wife.
He took back control of the party in 2022 and ousted Kryemadhi from its ranks the following year. In 2024, while both were under investigation by special anti-graft prosecutors, Meta filed for divorce, which was finalised in 2025. They have three children together.
Meta is currently in detention, while Kryemadhi is no longer directly involved in politics. She is highly active on social media, however, where she regularly disputes the charges against her while sharing details from her personal life.
Blerjana Bino, a researcher at the Safe Journalists Network NGO, said that since Kryemadhi has lost all conventional political power, “visibility itself becomes a resource”.
“Entertainment television in Albania is not a politically neutral space,” Bino told BIRN. “It is one of the highest-reach environments available, and she has inserted herself into it at precisely the moment her legal exposure is at its peak.”
In that sense, she said, Kryemadhi is having some success.
“The courtroom remains the site of legal judgment, but the battle over meaning is already taking place in the media, and on current evidence, that battle is not going badly for her.”
Crossover of courts and showbusiness
Kryemadhi’s role on Big Brother VIP represents a rapprochement of sorts between the ex-politician and Top Channel.
The two used to regularly exchange allegations of criminal wrongdoing, and Kryemadhi even sued the channel in 2023 for alleged defamation. It is unclear how the case ended.
Goci said “both parties benefit” from the new relationship, regardless of any ethical implications involved in a national broadcaster providing a platform for a former politician currently charged with corruption.
“I think that Ms. Kryemadhi… is seeking to finally escape political life by using television popularity, so that her image is no longer associated with criminal facts,” Goci told BIRN.
Bino, meanwhile, said the interweaving of showbusiness and justice cannot be good.
“When legal developments are interwoven with humour and television personality, the seriousness of the judicial process competes with more consumable narratives,” she said. “Albanian media is providing the infrastructure for this for free, or so it seems.”
Balkan politicians on reality TV
Monika Kryemadhi isn’t the only politician from the region who has appeared on a reality television show. Some, like Kryemadhi, have joined as commentators, but some as contestants, risking ridicule for the sake of wider recognition.
The first Serbian politician to take part in Big Brother (Veliki Brat in Serbian) was Nenad Canak, of the centre-left League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina, in 2009. At the time, Canak was an MP in the northern Vojvodina province’s parliament; opposition politicians clamed at the time that he was appearing on TV “purely to promote his own career”, BIRN reported.
A prominent MP from the governing Serbian Progressive Party, Marijan Risticevic, also participated in reality show Farma (The Farm) in 2010, although before he was elected to the national parliament.
In Kosovo, Anita Haradinaj, the wife of sometime prime minister Ramush Haradinaj, appeared as a commentator on the Big Brother Kosova show for a couple of seasons. One of the show’s winners, Lumbardh Salihu, went the opposite way by entering politics with the opposition Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK party after winning the competition. He stood for parliament twice but failed to make it into the legislature.
One of the rare cases linking Bosnia and Herzegovina’s political sphere with reality television is that of Sulejman Haljevac Memo, a Sarajevo-based painter who won the reality show Farma in 2013. He also won another reality show, Izgubljeni, further raising his media profile before going into politics. Haljevac later served as a councillor in Sarajevo’s Centar municipality and ran as a candidate for the Sarajevo Canton Assembly.
In Romania, businessman and politician Cristian Boureanu, who was an MP from 2004 to 2012 with the Democratic Liberal Party, was a contestant on the Survivor Romania show in 2025.
Source: BalkanInsight
