Thursday 22:51
EU Integrations
Albania aligned, complied, and extended its hand to Belgrade, and paid for the gesture in Prishtina and at home. Serbia refused alignment, produced Banjska, destabilized three neighbors, and filed a charge defining the discovery of its victims as damage to the state. One candidate answers for everything. The other has never answered for anything. by …
EU Integrations
Merit must work both ways, Ferit Hoxha said in Luxembourg. Then he described his country in the one language that guarantees it never will. by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana) Ferit Hoxha said something in Luxembourg last week that needed saying, and we want to give him full credit before we quarrel with him. Merit-based, he …
EU Integrations
The European Commission asks Albania to govern by evidence, transparency, and reasoned judgment. Its own 2026 Rule of Law Report deserves to be measured by the same standards. By Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana) On Friday the European Commission published SWD(2026) 928 final, its annual chapter on the rule of law in Albania. On page four …
EU Integrations
Klea Ukaj (Michigan, USA) A protester was injured at Zvërnec on the thirtieth of May, during a demonstration against construction on the coast near Vlorë. What followed on the Albanian side was neither silence nor denial. Within hours the State Police withdrew the inaccurate account its local directorate had first given, apologized for it …
EU Integrations
Editorial Board On the day Albania crossed the hardest procedural threshold in its accession process, the most authoritative German voice on the Western Balkans published a thread about the future of European enlargement. Michael Martens of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung named the candidates for whom the European Union should now consider transitional architecture below full …
EU Integrations
The expansion of Albania’s media audit from 4,536 to 106,962 articles strengthens the empirical challenge to soft-capture assumptions while sharpening the question of what EU evaluation frameworks actually measure. Tirana Examiner On 12 May, Buletin Intelligence published the follow-up to the study this publication engaged on 5 May. The original sample of 4,536 political …
EU Integrations
The same week Berlin authored the harshest conditionality applied to a fully aligned candidate state in the region’s history, the Serbian Progressive Party endorsed the Communist Party of China in writing and the President of Serbia received the Order of Friendship from Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People where Putin had signed …
EU Integrations
Two decades of reform and strategic loyalty have left Albania treated not as a future member of the European Union but as a permanently managed candidate, inside a process whose conditions evolve faster than its promises. by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana) Today the Council Working Party on Enlargement cleared the EU Common Position on Albania’s …
EU Integrations
by Aurel Cara (Tirana) On May 14, the Parliament adopted a joint resolution on Albania’s accession to the European Union. Both the majority and the opposition described the vote as a moment of rare cross-party agreement on the country’s most consequential foreign-policy commitment. The description is accurate, within the narrow band that the negotiations …
