Tuesday 23:48
The Examiner
Belgrade’s official narrative erases Albanian victims by design. Europe’s accession process allows that erasure to harden into fact. By Albatros Rexhaj Twenty-seven years after Serbian forces expelled nearly one million Albanians from Kosovo, burning villages, executing civilians, and filling mass graves that would later be discovered on Serbian soil, Belgrade held a commemoration. Officials gathered …
The Examiner
By Renada Bici (Tirana Examiner Legal Desk) Albania’s Constitution has guaranteed the right of direct popular participation since its adoption in 1998. Article 150 granted citizens the power to demand referendums on laws and issues of national importance. For 26 years, that guarantee existed on paper and nowhere else. The Electoral Code’s Part Nine …
The Examiner
A Belgrade security report barely mentions Albania. What it does say should alarm Tirana. By Hajdi Xhixha (Tirana) A research report published recently by the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy sets out to answer a question that Albania should be asking about itself but rarely does with sufficient rigour: who are the external actors …
The Examiner
by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana) Last week, El País, one of Europe’s most widely read newspapers, asked Lea Ypi to name the two great problems of the 21st century. Ypi is the Ralph Miliband Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics, an Albanian who grew up under Hoxha’s dictatorship, whose grandfather …
The Examiner
Berlin received a delegation. The next night, Tirana burned. The Editorial Board The photograph requires no caption. A German flag. An EU flag. Two Albanian flags. Behind them, riot police in formation, lit by fire. A projectile suspended mid-air. Tirana. March 22. The night after the Democratic Party’s meetings in Berlin. By evening, a …
The Examiner
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 …
The Examiner
A party that normalizes Molotov cocktails is not a credible guide to European standards By Ardit Rada (Tirana) When Washington closed its doors to Sali Berisha — sanctioned by both the United States and the United Kingdom on corruption grounds — the Democratic Party needed a new capital to court. It found one in …
The Examiner
The country spent €10 billion on investment and produced a fiscal model that depends on the people it is losing by Xhenis Kuçi (Tirana) In 2025, for the first time in Albania’s post-communist fiscal history, wages overtook consumption as the primary engine of state revenue. Taxes on salaries and labor contributions — once a …
The Examiner
By Hajdi Xhixha (Tirana) Democracy measurement has become one of the most consequential academic enterprises of our time. What began as a scholarly effort to track political change across countries has evolved into an infrastructure that shapes diplomatic positioning, conditions development assistance, and frames enlargement negotiations. When the Varieties of Democracy Institute publishes its …
