How Europe Can Lose Albania

Editorial Board | Tirana Examiner

There is a version of what is currently happening between Albania and its European partners that the opposition would like Europe to accept. In that version, the Albanian government’s position on the Balluku immunity case is evidence of institutional capture, Prime Minister Rama’s defense of a close associate is proof of impunity culture, and the IBAR blockage is a legitimate consequence of a rule of law failure that must be corrected before accession can proceed. The opposition is making this argument loudly and with considerable skill.

Europe should understand what it is aligning with if it accepts that version. And it should be clear that accepting it is a choice, not a conclusion.

The Socialist Party is the dominant political force in Albania. It will remain so for as long as the Democratic Party remains under the control of Sali Berisha and his family’s political apparatus. That is not a normative assessment of either party. It is an observation about electoral arithmetic on any foreseeable timeline relevant to accession. Whoever governs Albania through this process will be Edi Rama.

Rama’s position on Balluku is not indefensible on its own terms. Believing in the innocence of a close associate is not a crime. It is the presumption of innocence functioning as it should at the political level. Pursuing a process in which a cooperating former official does not sit in pre-trial detention while awaiting a trial that may vindicate her is not obstruction. Balluku is cooperating with the prosecution. The government has not taken a single step to curtail SPAK’s mandate, competencies, budget, or jurisdiction. The factual record does not support the framing Brussels has partially accepted.

What the opposition is doing is strategically coherent. Blocking IBAR progress under Rama, forcing a diplomatic crisis over a parliamentary immunity vote, and presenting European hesitation as evidence that the Prime Minister is the obstacle to Albania’s European future: that is a rational opposition strategy in a country where EU accession is the dominant public aspiration.

It is not a European strategy. It is an Albanian domestic political strategy that European institutions are being invited to execute.

This is not a legal disagreement about parliamentary immunity. It is a contest over who controls the definition of reform in Albania, and Europe is handing that contest to the side that cannot win elections.

If Germany and others insist on their current reading, condition the IBAR on a parliamentary outcome that requires the governing majority to capitulate to prosecutorial supremacy on constitutionally contested grounds, and treat the opposition’s interpretation as the authoritative account of what occurred, they are not protecting the rule of law. They are choosing sides. The side they are choosing has a structural interest in Albania not progressing under its current government. European institutions do not share that interest. Acting as though they do is not a policy position. It is a contradiction.

Albania is the only genuinely pro-European candidate country in the Western Balkans. No alternative vector exists here: no Moscow flirtation, no Beijing leverage, no strategic ambiguity deployed as a negotiating instrument. Albania opened all 33 negotiating chapters in three years, restructured its judiciary from its foundations at the EU’s own design, created and preserved an independent anti-corruption prosecution the government has not touched. It does not oscillate. It executes.

If that country begins to experience European integration as a mechanism of political pressure applied against it in the service of an opposition that cannot win power through elections, something changes. Not immediately. Not loudly. But the institutional conclusion accumulates: performance is punished when it produces inconvenient political outcomes, and the framework is less interested in Albania’s accession than in using accession conditionality as a variable in Albanian domestic competition.

That conclusion, once it takes hold, produces exactly the oscillation Albania has until now refused to perform.

Europe can lose Albania. Not to a rival power. Through the slower process of demonstrating to the one candidate that actually believed in the project that the project’s rules are applied against it when convenient, and suspended for others when not.

The opposition reads the current moment as a victory. It may be right. But a European strategy that produces opposition victories in Tirana by blocking the accession progress of the most consistently pro-European government in the Western Balkans is not enlargement policy.

It is how you lose the only country that never needed to be persuaded that Europe was worth it.