Berisha’s Vetting Gambit

 A promise to reverse judicial reform signals either reckless populism or a calculated bet on institutional exhaustion.

by Ardit Bido (Tirana)

*The author is a Member of the Albanian Parliament (Socialist Party). The Tirana Examiner publishes contributors across the political spectrum; party affiliation is disclosed in the interest of transparency.*

Sali Berisha has a habit of saying the quiet part out loud.

In an online exchange with supporters this week, the Democratic Party leader announced that if he returns to power he will revisit Albania’s vetting process — the central pillar of the 2016 Justice Reform — and restore to their posts judges and prosecutors dismissed through the process, provided they can demonstrate that their removal was politically motivated.

If the international community were asked for its reaction, the answer would be predictable: alarm.

The vetting process was not an Albanian improvisation. It emerged from years of negotiation between Tirana, Brussels, and Washington, embedded in constitutional amendments approved unanimously by parliament and monitored by international observers precisely because Albania’s judiciary had, by any honest accounting, been deeply compromised by political patronage and organized crime.

To declare the process reversible is not a technical policy proposal. It is a challenge to the entire architecture of Albania’s justice reform.

Yet Berisha’s framing does not exist in a political vacuum.

Nearly a decade of vetting has produced both results and resentments. Hundreds of magistrates were dismissed, leaving the judicial system dramatically understaffed. Courts operate with skeletal benches. Appeals accumulate. The Special Appeals Chamber continues to face a substantial backlog of cases contesting vetting decisions.

In a political culture where institutions are often assumed to serve political power rather than principle, the claim that some dismissals may have been unfair — procedurally, politically, or administratively — finds an audience.

The question therefore is not whether Berisha means what he says.

He probably does, in the way politicians mean things that are politically useful to say.

The real question is what strategic calculation lies behind the statement.

Three interpretations are possible.

The first is straightforward political mobilization. With the March 12 protest framed around demanding Prime Minister Edi Rama’s resignation, Berisha needs to sustain a narrative that Albania’s governing system itself has become illegitimate. Expanding that narrative to include the justice reform architecture serves a clear purpose: if the judiciary itself is portrayed as politically manipulated, then attacking the vetting process becomes, rhetorically at least, a defense of justice rather than an attack on it.

The second reading is more transactional.

The vetting process created a large and politically visible class of displaced legal professionals. Judges, prosecutors, lawyers, their families, and their professional networks represent a constituency with grievances and organizational capacity. Promising reinstatement is not only a legal proposal; it is a political offer to a group that feels excluded from the new judicial order.

The third interpretation is the most consequential.

Albania’s EU accession trajectory rests heavily — perhaps decisively — on the credibility of justice reform. For Brussels, the vetting process is not merely one reform among many; it is the mechanism through which the rule of law is supposed to be rebuilt.

That is precisely why the reform was structured as a one-way institutional process rather than a cyclical political decision. Once the legitimacy of the vetting outcomes becomes negotiable, the credibility of the entire reform collapses.

European officials have watched similar institutional reversals unfold elsewhere in the region. In countries where political leadership attempted to revisit judicial reform settlements after the fact, the result was not technical debate but a prolonged confrontation with Brussels over rule-of-law commitments.

Albania would not be immune to the same consequences.

Any government that attempted to systematically reverse vetting outcomes would face immediate diplomatic repercussions. The issue would not be treated as a domestic policy adjustment but as a direct challenge to the commitments Albania made to the European Union when it rewrote its constitution in 2016.

The result would not be a polite exchange of concerns. It would be a structural confrontation with the EU accession process itself.

That leaves three possible explanations.

Either Berisha does not believe he will actually have to implement this promise.

Or he believes he could manage the international backlash if he did.

Or he has not fully considered what reversing the vetting process would mean for Albania’s relationship with the European Union.

None of these possibilities is reassuring.

The timing adds another layer of contradiction.

The same week Berisha floated the idea of reinstating dismissed magistrates, Albania’s parliament was preparing to vote on lifting immunity to allow the arrest of Belinda Balluku, the former deputy prime minister facing corruption charges brought by the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution (SPAK). Berisha’s party intends to support the arrest — a position that allows the Democrats to present themselves as defenders of accountability.

But there is an obvious tension here.

You cannot convincingly champion anti-corruption prosecutions while simultaneously proposing to dismantle the institutional mechanism designed to purge compromised magistrates from the system.

Albanian politics has always had a remarkable capacity to hold contradictory positions at the same time. But contradictions still have consequences.

Whether this one matters will depend largely on whether anyone presses Berisha to clarify it.

Domestically, the opposition’s political debate remains focused primarily on Rama. Internationally, Berisha has been largely absent from official diplomatic engagement since his designation by the United States in 2021.

The result is a peculiar vacuum: a proposal with potentially enormous consequences for Albania’s institutional future circulating largely without scrutiny.

And in Albanian politics, proposals that escape scrutiny have a way of becoming reality.

*Ardit Bido is a Member of the Albanian Parliament (Socialist Party) and a historian by training. He previously served as Director General of the General Directorate of Archives and has written extensively on institutional reform, historical accountability, and Albania’s European integration process.*