Albania Is a Democracy, and Its Problems Are the Problems of One

On the International Vocabulary That Misclassifies the Country

by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana)

The international commentary on Albania, in its English-language form, has acquired a vocabulary the country does not deserve. The vocabulary borrows from the conversation about Hungary, from the conversation about Serbia, from the conversation about hybrid regimes and democratic backsliding and captured states. It is applied to Albania in tones of qualified concern that, in their cumulative weight, suggest a country drifting toward the wrong side of the line that distinguishes functioning democracies from those that have ceased to be functioning democracies. This is the misclassification this piece addresses, and the case against it is empirical.

Albania is a functioning democracy. The standard for that claim is not absence of problems. It is the operation of the institutional architecture that distinguishes democracies as a category from the hybrid and captured cases that do not qualify. The architecture has specific components, and each of them can be tested. Free and contested elections with documented alternation in power. An independent judiciary with the demonstrated capacity to act against figures inside the governing party. Civil and political rights exercised in practice, including the right to organize, to publish, and to protest. A regulatory environment in which state agencies produce findings inconvenient to the government and publish them anyway. Civilian control of the security services. A constitutional order whose decisions the executive accepts. Each of these returns, in the Albanian case, a finding consistent with the operation of a functioning democracy.

The Democratic Party held power from 2005 to 2013. The Socialist Party has held it since. The next election will be contested, the result will be accepted, and whichever side prevails will assume office through the constitutional process. Nothing in the institutional record predicts otherwise. SPAK, the Special Anti-Corruption Structure that emerged from the justice reform, has investigated and indicted figures across the political spectrum, including the sitting mayor of Tirana from the governing party. The Constitutional Court has ruled against the executive on questions of source protection, on the limits of immunity, and on the boundaries of administrative power. The Audiovisual Media Authority, in March of this year, reported that the Democratic Party had absorbed 60.12 percent of political television time and published the finding without modification.

This is not what a captured state looks like. It is what a democracy under stress looks like, and a democracy under stress is the only kind of democracy that has ever existed.

The press environment, on the empirical record now available, sustains the same conclusion. A monitoring sample of 4,536 political articles across 43 outlets over 66 days shows opposition voices outweighing government voices by nearly two to one in mention counts, critical-orientation outlets outweighing pro-government outlets by 7.4 to 1 in volume, and the most aggressive accusations against the prime minister, including charges that ministers ordered killings and that the country is a narco-state, circulating without sanction in the headlines of mainstream titles. The opposition leader, sixteen months into a non-grata designation that some readings of media capture would predict to suppress his coverage, accumulates more headline mentions than the prime minister himself. None of these are the published-output signatures of a country that has ceased to be a democracy.

The country has problems, and a piece that ignored them would be unserious. Pre-trial detention rates are high enough to constitute a Chapter 23 accession issue. Access to public information for working journalists is patchy. Ownership concentration in the audiovisual sector produces predictable conflicts of interest. The legal framework governing media has documented gaps in editorial-independence protections. Each of these is a real problem. None of them, individually or collectively, moves the country across the line that distinguishes democracies from non-democracies. They are problems within the category, not problems that reclassify it. Every functioning democracy in Europe has a list of comparable problems. The honest comparison is not between Albania and a democratic ideal. It is between Albania and the actual democracies it shares a continent with, and on that comparison Albania is recognizably one of them.

The misclassification matters because it is consequential. The international vocabulary that places Albania adjacent to the hybrid and captured cases distorts the accession assessment, underserves the readers of English-language commentary on the region, and damages the credibility of the institutions whose evaluations carry weight. It is also unfair to the population of a country that has produced, through institutional reform and political competition across three decades, a democratic order more durable than the vocabulary acknowledges. The criticism the country deserves is the criticism a functioning democracy deserves: targeted at specific failures, calibrated to the actual institutional capacity to address them, and grounded in the evidence rather than in the comparative anxiety of commentary more familiar with the captured cases of the region.

Albania owes itself the criticism a functioning democracy deserves, and it owes itself the recognition of being one. Both are present in the evidence. Neither is fully present in the international vocabulary as it stands. The vocabulary should be revised to match the country, and the country should hold itself to the standard the vocabulary, when revised, would require. That is the conversation Albania is owed, and it is the conversation Albanian journalism, in English and in Albanian, should be part of producing.