Better Than Albania? Show the Work

By Ardit Bido, Member of Parliament

When the V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 placed Albania outside the liberal democracy threshold, the opposition reached for it like a verdict. Embedded in their outrage was a specific claim, one that deserves a specific answer. The claim is that Montenegro, Kosovo, and North Macedonia are better democracies than Albania. I want to examine that claim on the one dimension that matters most to any functioning democracy: whether the state actually prosecutes its own powerful.

Let us start with Montenegro.
The European Commission’s 2025 enlargement report is unambiguous: investigations and prosecutions in high-level corruption cases are improving, but final convictions remain low, and the lack of effective and deterrent penalties continues to produce a perception of impunity. In September 2025, the United States State Department took the extraordinary step of designating a former Montenegrin mayor and the former President of the Supreme Court of Montenegro as persons ineligible for entry into the United States, both implicated in corruption that enabled drug trafficking. The sitting President of the Supreme Court. Corrupt. Sanctioned by Washington. This is the democracy we are supposed to envy.

Now Kosovo.
The Kosovo Law Institute monitored the justice system through 2024 and into 2025 and found something worse than failure — it found a pattern. Of 444 people accused of corruption in that period, only 11 were high-profile officials — 2.47 percent. Of those 11, only three were accused while still holding office. The rest were prosecuted only after they had left power. Kosovo’s justice system waits until officials are no longer dangerous before it moves against them. The European Union’s own representative at a recent Pristina anti-corruption roundtable was blunt about it: things are improving, he said, but not when it comes to high-level corruption cases. That is not happening.

And North Macedonia.
The European Commission’s 2024 report recorded zero final convictions for high-level corruption in 2023. Not low — zero. And since then the situation has worsened. The European Parliament’s 2025 report noted with serious concern that North Macedonia’s track record has deteriorated further, because the government amended its own Criminal Code in ways that reduced penalties and shortened statutes of limitations — causing active cases to be terminated mid-investigation. North Macedonia did not merely fail to prosecute. It rewrote the rules to make prosecution harder, and then watched cases collapse.

Now Albania.
SPAK exists. It was built from nothing, through parliamentary legislation, over the sustained resistance of everyone who benefited from the previous impunity. The vetting process removed judges and prosecutors who had spent careers untouchable. A sitting mayor was arrested. A deputy prime minister was indicted. Former ministers were convicted. The European Commission’s 2025 report acknowledges the increase in SPAK’s capacity for financial investigations and the systematic use of asset confiscations. These are not claims made by the Albanian government — they are findings made by the institution that sets the terms of this country’s European path.
And then there is the report the opposition has not mentioned.

Freedom House published its Freedom in the World 2026 assessment on March 19 of this week. It evaluates individual freedoms directly, the right to vote, freedom of expression, equality before the law. Albania ranks first in the Western Balkans, with 69 points. Montenegro follows at 68. Kosovo scores 61. North Macedonia lower still. The opposition has spent days telling Albanians that V-Dem proves their country is worse than its neighbors. They did not mention this report. They did not mention it because it does not serve the argument. That is not analysis. That is selection.

Different reports use different methodologies, different expert pools, different data cycles. They sometimes reach different conclusions about countries in the middle of deep structural reform. That is precisely why serious people read all of them, not the one that confirms what they already decided to say.

The opposition is free to argue that Albania has not yet reached the standard it should. That is a legitimate position. What is not legitimate is the parallel claim — that Montenegro, Kosovo, and North Macedonia stand on higher democratic ground, and that the indices confirm it. They do not. When the evidence is examined in full — not cherry-picked — it shows that all three countries face the same structural challenges Albania faces, that none of them have solved them, and that on both the specific question of prosecuting the powerful and the broader question of individual freedoms, Albania’s record is more substantive than any of theirs.

I will not accept, by day or by night, that these countries are better democracies than Albania. Not because Albanian pride demands it. Because the evidence does not.

83 mandates out of 140. Not from Gothenburg. From Albania.

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.