Why Albania is thrilled about Anthony Albanese’s election win

There is an interesting reason why Anthony Albanese is making headlines in a small country in Europe.

Anthony Albanese’s election win is making headlines in a small country in Europe.

Albania appears to be thrilled Mr Albanese will be leading Australia – because of his name.

Albanese is an Italian surname that means Albanian. According to ancestry.com it was a name applied to someone from Albania or from one of the Albanian settlements in Abruzzo, Apulia, Campania and Sicily.

A headline on the Albanian news site Politiko said: “An ‘Albanian’ is elected the new Prime Minister of Australia, believed to be of Arbëresh origin.”

The news report explained that Mr Albanese was the son of Carlo Albanese from Barletta, which is a city in the region of Apulia in south eastern Italy.

Albanians appear excited about Anthony Albanese becoming Australian Prime Minister because his surname means Albanian in Italian. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

“In Apulia lives a large community of Arbëresh. It is believed that about 100,000 Arbëresh live there and that the father of the Australian politician also comes from this community,” the story is translated to have said.

“A strong sign of Arbëresh origin is the surname ‘Albanese’, which in Italian means ‘Albanian’.

“The Arbëresh are the descendants of Albanian refugees who fled their lands in the Balkans and settled in the southern parts of Italy in the Middle Ages, after the Ottoman conquest of a large part of Europe.”

Another Albanian site, Oculus News, ran the headline: “An Arbëresh wins the elections in Australia, Anthony Albanese the new Prime Minister.”

Mr Albanese didn’t meet his father until 2009.

He grew up thinking his mother met his father overseas and they got married, but his father then died in a car accident before they returned to Australia.

It wasn’t until he was a teenager that his mum, Maryanne Albanese, told him the truth.

Anthony Albanese with his father, Carlo Albanese, in Barletta, Italy, in 2009.

“We sat down just after dinner one night and she — it was very traumatic for her, I think, to tell me that in fact that wasn’t the case, that my father might still be alive, that she’d met him overseas, fallen pregnant with me, had told him and he had said, basically, that he was betrothed to someone from the town in Italy where he was from,” he told ABC 7:30 in 2016.

“I think that whole guilt associated with having a child out of wedlock in 1963 as a young Catholic woman was a big deal and, hence, the extent to which she had gone to in terms of adopting my father’s name, she wore an engagement and a wedding ring — the whole family just believed this story.”

After Maryanne’s death in 2002, Mr Albanese began searching for his father.

He recalled being asked by his son, Nathan, where his father was during a visit to Maryanne’s grave.

Mr Albanese found Carlo in 2009 and formed a relationship with him, making regular trips to Italy. Carlo died of cancer in 2014.

Mr Albanese will be the first Australian Prime Minister who isn’t of Anglo-Celtic heritage. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Mr Albanese was elected on Saturday night as the 31st leader of Australia.

He will be the first non-Anglo-Celtic Australian prime minister.

In the lead up to the election Mr Albanese said people from the Italian community told him they would vote for Labor for the first time in their lives because they wanted the government to reflect “modern Australia”.

Claiming his victory on Saturday night, Mr Albanese said: “My fellow Australians, it says a lot about our great country that a son of a single mum who was a disability pensioner, who grew up in public housing down the road in Camperdown, can stand before you tonight as Australia’s prime minister.”