EU Commissioner Praises Albania’s Anti-Corruption Record. The Opposition Misread Her.

by Aurel Cara (Tirana)

In an interview published Wednesday by Politico, EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos sat down to discuss the state of the bloc’s expansion agenda. The conversation turned, as it increasingly does when Albania comes up in Brussels, to the question of justice. A reporter asked her directly: how is Prime Minister Edi Rama handling the political pressure of having his former deputy prime minister under investigation for corruption? What Kos said in response was careful, affirmative toward Albanian institutions, and grounded in standard EU enlargement doctrine. By the time her words reached Tirana, they had been transformed into something else entirely.

Kos was unambiguous on the substance. Albania had done “an excellent job,” she said, progressing to the point where its justice system was now benchmarked against EU member state standards rather than mere candidate country expectations. On the Balluku investigation specifically, she praised SPAK, the Special Anti-Corruption and Organised Crime Prosecutor’s Office, as doing “a very good job,” and said the Commission was monitoring the case closely. The existence of high-profile prosecutions, she argued, was not a symptom of institutional failure but of institutional function. “What matters is, if those cases are there, what is their response to them,” she said.

She then widened the lens. Legislation alone, she observed, cannot defeat corruption if the broader social and political culture tolerates it. This applied, in her framing, to all candidate countries. It was not a diagnosis of Albania. It was a general principle of anti-corruption reform theory, the kind routinely deployed in Venice Commission assessments and European Commission progress reports. It was also, in Tirana, the sentence that detonated.

Democratic Party caucus chairman Gazmend Bardhi issued what he called a “forced response.” He accused Kos of making Albanian society “co-responsible for Edi Rama’s corruption,” and insisted that responsibility for the problem belongs solely to Rama personally. He demanded that European institutions distance themselves from what he called “inappropriate generalisations about Albanians.”

Belind Këlliçi went further. He framed Kos as a diplomat “charmed and bought by Edi Rama,” accused her of inviting Albanians to accept corruption as a national custom, and declared her remarks an unprecedented scandal.

Both men are wrong, and the error is telling.

Kos did not say Albanians accept corruption. She said that candidate countries, as a group, face the challenge of shifting cultural and institutional tolerance for corruption alongside legislative reform. This is the premise of every EU accession chapter on the rule of law. To hear it as a slur against Albanian society requires a deliberate choice to misread it.

Bardhi’s framing reduces the anti-corruption question to a single actor: Rama. Corruption exists because Rama protects it. SPAK is obstructed because Rama obstructs it. Albanian society is blameless. This is partially true. Corruption of the kind SPAK is prosecuting does not survive on one man’s protection alone. It survives because procurement networks, parliamentary votes and informal pressures distribute it across institutions. Acknowledging this is not insulting Albanians. It is the precondition for fixing the problem.

Këlliçi’s version is less coherent still. He accuses Kos of advocating for Rama in Brussels, while the plain content of her interview praises the prosecutor investigating Rama’s former deputy and offers no protection to anyone under scrutiny. The logic is not explained because it cannot be.

There is a real criticism available of Kos’s remarks, and neither man made it. She did not address the question of political interference in SPAK’s work, which is the live controversy in Tirana. She praised the institution without acknowledging the pressure it is reportedly under. That gap is worth examining. But examining it requires engaging with what she actually said, not with a version constructed for domestic consumption.

Bardhi and Këlliçi are experienced politicians who know how to read a Brussels statement. Their response on Wednesday was not an analytical failure. It was a rhetorical choice: to convert a technocratic observation into a national affront, because a national affront is easier to campaign on than a nuanced argument about institutional culture. That is a disservice to the public debate they claim to be advancing.