A Candidate, Not a Defendant

Brussels cannot pronounce a verdict on a project that does not yet exist, and it has no standing to ask Albania to choose between Europe and its own coast.

by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana)

“Albania should refrain from actions that could undermine the fulfillment of the closing benchmarks,” a European Commission spokesperson told POLITICO, adding that the bloc “expect[s] the Albanian authorities to act without delay.” As part of the closing benchmarks for Chapter 27 on environment and climate change, the spokesperson said, “Albania is expected to align fully with EU legislation in this area, including the Birds and the Habitats Directives,” and urged Tirana to repeal the changes to the Law on Protected Areas and to “terminate” the law on strategic investments. The spokesperson added: “We have already expressed our concerns to the minister of the environment about the potential shortcomings of this project,” and noted that the development “is also subject to ongoing SPAK investigations that reportedly extend beyond environmental concerns.”

Read those words again, slowly. They say more about Brussels than about Tirana.

That is the grammar of an institution instructing a subordinate. Refrain. Expect. Without delay. It is the language a government uses with a ministry that answers to it, not the language the Union owes a sovereign state that has chosen to walk toward membership on its own. The verbs give the speaker away.

Start with what the sentence assumes. Albania is a candidate, not a member. The Birds and Habitats Directives are not directly enforceable EU law in Albania in the way they are inside the Union. Albania does carry accession obligations and a duty to approximate its legislation to the acquis, and it disputes neither. But a candidate aligning itself toward those directives is not a member bound by them and answerable for their breach in Luxembourg. What Brussels holds over Tirana is one instrument: the power to open and close the chapters of a process Albania entered freely and can pace as it sees fit.

The obligation the spokesperson invoked is also narrower than it was made to sound. When Chapter 27 opened in September 2025, Albania accepted, among nine closing conditions, the repeal of the incompatible provisions of the 2024 amendments to the Law on Protected Areas, with the proposal due at the close of negotiations in 2027. Not the withdrawal of a whole law, but the repeal of its noncompliant articles. Not a task for this week, but a condition tied to a finish line two years off. The spokesperson took that and restated it, in the middle of a protest week, as a wholesale demand owed at once. “Without delay” describes a deadline the agreement does not set.

The spokesperson then moved to the project itself, and here the method fails. Brussels expressed concern about “the potential shortcomings of this project.” There is no project to carry shortcomings, at least none in a form that can be judged. No final proposal has been submitted. No environmental assessment exists, because there is nothing yet for an assessment to examine. This is not Albanian evasion. It is the order the Habitats Directive itself lays down: you assess a project in order to decide whether it may proceed, and the assessment comes before the authorization, never after it.

Look at what the Albanian state actually did in the days it was being reproached. When the investor fenced off the shoreline, an act of private overreach that no permit in the public eye could justify, the state did not stand behind it. It had the fencing removed. It then halted the project altogether, to wait until the plan is finalized, assessed, and approved through the proper channel. That is the conduct the closing benchmarks were written to produce. A government that stops its own flagship investment to wait for due process has done exactly what the acquis asks of it, and it deserved to be told so. Instead it was told to refrain, and to act without delay, as if it were the violator and not the authority that had called the violation off.

So the charge cannot hold on its own terms. To speak of the shortcomings of a project that has no assessable form, while the state has frozen everything pending that assessment, is to reach a verdict the directive reserves for a process not yet begun. Rama has held the line in public: nothing will be built at Zvernec that fails the environmental test. The halt is the proof he means it. Hold the government to that standard, by all means. You cannot also convict it of failing the standard before the test has been run.

There is a further confusion in the answer, and it is the kind that should not survive a first reading in the Berlaymont. Two of the demands belong to different worlds. The objection to the strategic investments law is not environmental at all. It is about competition, the worry that state assets might be handed over without an open tender and so distort the market. That lives in the chapters on competition and state aid. It is years old. It predates the flamingos, the lagoon, and the name of any foreign investor. The objection to the protected areas amendment is the environmental one, and it belongs to Chapter 27. The spokesperson merged the two into a single environmental charge. The protected areas law lowered a barrier to building inside protected zones; the investor privileges come from a separate statute; the contested land titles are a third matter, now before SPAK. Three instruments, three legal homes, folded into one accusation that leaves the listener with a picture of Albania failing everywhere at once.

Carelessness is the kind reading, and it does not quite fit. The phrasing is too practiced. Every term is standard enlargement vocabulary: closing benchmarks, align fully, act without delay, we have expressed our concerns. Read fast, it passes for a routine reminder. That is the point. A reproach dressed as boilerplate moves without friction, and it gives its author an easy retreat: we were only restating the benchmarks. But the words do what benchmarks do not. They turn a 2027 condition into an order for today, bundle a competition file with an environmental one, and pass sentence on a project that does not exist. People who write these lines know how they read in a foreign ministry. Whatever that is, it is not innocent.

And the damage left the room. The statement went out through POLITICO onto the wire, into the briefings of foreign ministries and the risk notes of investors, and it pinned a word on Albania at the worst possible moment. A frontrunner that had just opened the closing phase of its talks was recast in a single cycle as a state that has to be told to obey environmental law. Standing is the one asset a candidate cannot buy back quickly. Years of accession work get summed up, in a reader’s mind, by the latest adjective attached to the country, and the spokesperson supplied a bad one under cover of procedure.

This is the part that should worry anyone who actually wants Albania in the Union. By tying the demand to the fulfillment of the closing benchmarks, the spokesperson set Albania’s coast against Albania’s Europe, as though they were rival goods. Do this, or your membership suffers. Brussels should be the last party in Europe to build that collision. Albania’s European future is not a limit imposed on its development. It is the largest development project the country has, the one that carries the economy and the security with it. To call accession a leash is to misread the whole enterprise.

No one has the right to make Albania choose between the two, because the choice is false. A country that has made Europe its first ambition does not need to be threatened into it. Albania may develop its own land, and as a matter of sovereignty that needs no qualifier. The one honest condition is sequence: assessment before disturbance, the protections kept until the chapter closes. Albania has not only accepted that on paper. It has just shown it, by pulling down the fence and stopping the work until the process runs. Hold Tirana to that. But hold it to what it agreed, on the timeline it agreed, and not to an emergency invented at a podium.

The spokesperson’s paragraph will be forgotten in a week. The dent it left in Albania’s standing will take longer to repair. A Union that wants to grow should not address those it would welcome as if they already stood in the dock. Albania was not asked to choose between its coast and its flag. It was told to. The serious party in that exchange was not the one holding the microphone.