Albania and Europe’s Conditionality Without End

Germany has replaced the veto with a methodology in which Albania’s progress is acknowledged, praised, and indefinitely postponed, applying the harshest conditionality in the Western Balkans to the region’s most aligned state.

by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana)

Prime Minister, do not go to Brussels in the register you have chosen.

The document waiting for you on 26 May is a German text. Germany wrote it through the Council, in the room called COELA, over nearly three months. The Commission proposed something more proportionate in February. Germany did not accept the Commission’s draft. Germany rewrote it. The Council adopted Germany’s rewrite on 21 May. You are travelling to receive Germany’s rewrite, not the Commission’s draft, and you are calling it victory.

The two versions are public. Anyone in Tirana with an internet connection has read them this week. I have read them twice and I find the same thing both times. Thirty-two substantive changes, every one in the direction of sharper conditionality. Corruption escalated from “serious” to “fundamental.” Patronage networks named for the first time. Regret about parliamentary votes inserted. The Venice Commission immunity standard wired into a closing benchmark. The investor citizenship law marked for repeal. A new paragraph on real estate and construction-sector corruption with no equivalent in February. The pattern has an author.

The COELA process is confidential. The German position on Western Balkans rule of law is not. Germany has been saying these things publicly for ten years, through the Federal Foreign Office, the Chancellery’s Western Balkans envoy, German MEPs who have driven every European Parliament Albania resolution for three Parliaments. The Dutch follow. The Nordics endorse. The French, the Italians, the Spanish, the Greeks, the Hungarians, the Portuguese, none of them led on this kind of language in any Council document I have read in years. The text was written by Berlin. The Council adopted it. The Commission accommodated it.

Berlin had help, and the help came from Tirana.

Gazment Bardhi and Jorida Tabaku have been the Bundestag’s and the Foreign Ministry’s primary Albanian opposition interlocutors throughout the drafting period. The CDU Bundestag meeting with Patricia Lips. The Krichbaum meeting at the Foreign Ministry in March. The three-day programme at the Chancellery. The most recent trip this month. The visits are documented and the framings they carried into those rooms have come out in the text. Tabaku has used “patronazhistët” as her frame for the Socialist Party’s electoral architecture for years; the COELA text introduces “patronage networks” for the first time in any Albanian accession document. “Political protection of corruption” was the joint Bardhi-Tabaku framing in March; the COELA text now contains the regret sentence and the language on “increased and concerning attempts” to influence SPAK. The “Golden Passports” framing Tabaku built maps to the investor citizenship repeal benchmark, a benchmark Montenegro never received. The opposition was lobbying for sharper text. The German government received the lobbying. The text reflects it.

This is not co-authorship in the literal sense. The drafting was done by Council legal services and German MFA officials. It is the linguistic signature of a campaign Germany chose to weight and not balance.

Compare the result to what Montenegro received in June 2024. Montenegro’s Chapter 23 IBAR calls corruption “an issue of concern” and asks Podgorica to “intensify efforts.” Albania’s text calls corruption “prevalent in most areas of public and business life, including in all branches of central and local government and institutions” and “generalised and wide-spread” and “an area of crucial concern.” Montenegro’s text contains no regret about parliamentary votes, names no patronage networks, binds closing to no Venice Commission immunity standard, requires repeal of no specific national law. Albania’s text contains all four. Montenegro’s Special Prosecution Office had produced almost nothing at the senior-official level when its IBAR was issued. SPAK has produced two former prime ministers in active prosecution, a former deputy prime minister as a fugitive, a sitting deputy prime minister under investigation, the mayor of the capital under arrest, sitting MPs under indictment, former ministers convicted, eighteen senior officials indicted in 2025 alone, 871 proceedings in a single year. Germany raised the bar for Albania specifically, against a prosecution record that exceeds anything Montenegro had built.

Then there is what Germany has chosen not to measure.

Corruption is a regional condition. The Western Balkans share it. What they do not share is the structural penetration of their states by hostile foreign networks. Montenegro has Russian networks in real estate, banking, the citizenship scheme, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and a parliamentary bloc with documented Moscow ties; the 2016 coup attempt was Russian. Serbia is worse. The Belgrade state apparatus is integrated with Russian intelligence. Sputnik Serbia and RT Serbia operate openly. The Serbian security services maintain liaison with the Russian FSB. The Vučić government has refused every sanctions package against Russia since the war began. Belgrade is a Russian client state inside the accession framework and the framework continues to negotiate with it as if this were not the case.

Albania has none of this. No Russian-aligned party of any significance. No Russian-funded media. No Russian intelligence integration. Albania has joined every sanctions package. Albania hosts NATO infrastructure. Albania has aligned with the EU on Ukraine from day one. There is nothing in Tirana corresponding to Sputnik Serbia. There is nothing in the Albanian parliament corresponding to the pro-Russian blocs in Belgrade, Podgorica, or Skopje.

Germany has calibrated its conditionality on corruption alone, as if the year were 2014 and the principal threat to the EU’s eastern frontier were poor governance. The principal threat is not poor governance. The principal threat is what Russia is doing in the region, and the German framework does not measure it. If it did, Albania would be receiving the softest text in the region and the fastest closing pathway. Instead, Albania receives the harshest text applied to the most aligned candidate, while Belgrade is treated as a normal accession partner with technical chapters to negotiate.

If SPAK is not enough, nothing is enough. SPAK is what Albania built. SPAK is what the document itself praises in the same paragraph that conditions closing on results beyond what the praised institution has produced, against a benchmark Germany has not defined, in a timeframe Germany has not specified, to a standard Germany will declare met or unmet by judgment alone. Germany has not blocked any country’s accession through veto. Germany has built a methodology that makes veto unnecessary. The mechanism is more deniable. The result is the same.

On 26 May, somewhere in Vlora or Kukës or Korçë, a Socialist voter will watch the conference coverage. Someone who voted in 2013 and 2017 and 2021 and 2025. Someone who has waited a long time for Europe and has chosen, four times, the party that promised to deliver it. They will watch their Prime Minister, in Brussels, thank the Council for a document whose closing benchmarks demand more than what their government has already done at a rate without precedent. They will watch the photograph. They will not read the document. They will believe what they are told. That is the part Berlin has counted on.

You can still go. Not going produces its own cost and the chamber will read absence as weakness. But do not celebrate. Do not bring the parliamentary majority into the photograph as a co-victor. Do not let the civil servants who have built the transformation, the prosecutors and judges who have produced the results this text dismisses, the four-time electorate that has kept this government in office to do the work, watch their Prime Minister thank Brussels for what Berlin has done to the file in their name.

Albania has done the work. Albania has built SPAK and the Special Court and the vetting process. Albania has aligned on foreign policy. Albania has cooperated with Frontex and Europol at a level the document itself calls exemplary. The German text takes that work, acknowledges it, and adds more demands than Montenegro received, while embedding the framings of Albanian opposition politicians as closing conditions, while ignoring the dimension on which Albania most clearly outperforms every other candidate in the region.

Name what has been done. Not in the chamber on 26 May. After. To the Commission, which proposed proportionality and was overridden. To the member states whose positions in COELA were softer than Germany’s. To your own public, which is entitled to know that the standard being applied to Albania is not the Commission’s standard, not the EU’s collective standard, not the standard applied to Montenegro, but Germany’s standard, calibrated for Albania at a level it has not been calibrated at anywhere else, shaped by domestic political actors lobbying from Berlin against their own state’s parliamentary majority, indifferent to the war Europe is actually fighting.

Albania is not a guinea pig for testing a German methodology that ignores the war Europe is actually fighting.

This is the warning. From Tirana. Before the flight.

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