Saturday 03:45
The Examiner
by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana) Ditmir Bushati has written a note about Albania’s EU accession process that reads, at first encounter, like serious intervention. The concern he raises, that the public debate has been hollowed out into a performance of slogans while the substantive reform conversation goes unexamined, is not wrong. But a legitimate concern …
The Examiner
by Ditmir Bushati Albania’s EU accession process is being covered by the fog of a debate that serves no one. Public opinion is being oriented around the approval or non-approval of the European Commission’s Interim Benchmark Assessment Report (IBAR) in the field of the rule of law. From the very starting point, the negotiation …
The Examiner
The Tirana Examiner Legal Desk provides institutional analysis of Albanian legislation and judicial developments. This analysis is based on the draft amending text and Law 10/2023 as enacted. Renada Bici | Tirana Examiner Legal Desk The draft amendments to Law 10/2023 on classified information arrived in the Albanian parliament without significant public commentary. That …
The Examiner
On 29 March, the Austrian daily Der Standard published a piece by its Balkans correspondent Adelheid Wölfl on the state of European integration in the Western Balkans. The article is, in many respects, a competent survey of familiar anxieties: Montenegro’s uneven reform record, the durability of Vučić’s influence across the region, the thinness of political …
The Examiner
by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana) COELA met today. It meets again Friday. A third revision of the Draft Common Position circulates tomorrow. That is not a crisis calendar. It is a working one, and the most important thing it records is a shift that has received almost no attention in the coverage of Albania’s accession …
The Examiner
Renada Bici | Tirana Examiner The exchange was quick and telling. Prime Minister Edi Rama, speaking in Tirana’s Unit 12, called the claim that corruption has risen “a great lie” and rejected it with disgust. Gazment Bardhi, leading the Democratic Party’s parliamentary group, responded that the denial itself is the problem, that it shields …
The Examiner
Editorial Board, The Tirana Examiner The Ohrid Framework Agreement of 2001 was not a favour granted to Albanians in North Macedonia. It was the price of peace — a binding compact between the Macedonian state and a quarter of its population, extracted at the cost of an armed conflict that brought the country to the …
The Examiner
No vote. No block. No nine countries. Just a claim the process itself does not support. Ardit Rada | Tirana Examiner On April 4, Sali Berisha described a decision that was never taken. Nine European Union member states, he told the press, had blocked Albania’s IBAR report in Brussels. Integration was frozen. Penalties loomed. By …
The Examiner
In a system built on ambiguity, Braçe remains a rare political fact: named, accountable, and forever incompatible. Ardit Rada | Tirana Examiner Albanian political commentary has developed a reliable reflex when confronted with internal party dissent: it reaches for the most dramatic available frame. In recent days, that frame has been applied to Erion …
