Reading Brussels Backwards

The opposition has built its post-IBAR communication on a category error. The error has political utility. It does not survive contact with the document.

by Ardit Rada (Tirana)

The Interim European Union Common Position on Cluster 1, adopted by COREPER on 21 May and to be received at the Eighth Intergovernmental Conference on 26 May, is a 38-page accession instrument with a specific operational function. It confirms that Albania has, in the Council’s own formulation, “overall, met the interim benchmarks set in the opening European Union Common Position.” It sets the closing benchmarks against which Cluster 1 will be assessed for provisional closure. That is what the document is.

In the days since its adoption, opposition voices have read it as something else. Gazment Bardhi has called it a “slap to the government.” Grigels Muçollari described it as evidence that “Albania needs different governance.” Other Democratic Party figures have framed it as a Brussels verdict on the Rama government’s record. The opposition has been consistent in this reading. It is also wrong.

The opposition is reading benchmarks as findings, calibration as verdict, and procedural confirmation as condemnation. This is the central error. Once it is identified, most of what the opposition has said about the document over the past week collapses.

The adopted text was negotiated through the standard Council process. The Commission produced an initial draft in February. COELA reviewed it across nearly three months, and the final text adopted by COREPER on 21 May is harder than the Commission’s February proposal in several specific respects. This is not unusual. COELA’s role is to reconcile member-state positions, and member-state positions on Western Balkans rule of law have hardened across the past decade. Whether the calibration is correctly set is a legitimate question and there are serious arguments on both sides. What is not in question is that the adopted document is the binding Council position, produced by the Council’s working procedures, and that the document’s content is what Albania must now operate against.

The diagnostic passages in the document are real and they are severe. Corruption is described as “prevalent in most areas of public and business life” and as “an area of crucial concern.” The document registers regret about specific parliamentary decisions. It names “increased and concerning attempts” at high-level political interference against justice institutions. These are not soft findings.

But severity in diagnosis is not the same as judgment in conclusion. The document’s operational conclusion is contained in the procedural finding that the interim benchmarks were met and the closing benchmarks are now set. Without that finding, the document would not be authorising the Eighth IGC at all. The praise of SPAK, the acknowledgment of cooperation with Frontex and Europol at a level the document itself calls exemplary, the recognition of vetting-process completion, the validation of foreign-policy alignment, these are the structural findings that allow the procedural conclusion to be reached. The opposition’s reading requires ignoring them.

It is worth being direct about why the opposition reads the document the way it does. The reading is not analytical. It is political. A document framed as Brussels condemnation of the government strengthens the opposition’s domestic position. A document framed as procedural confirmation of progress weakens it. The opposition has picked the framing that serves the opposition’s interests. That is not a sin. It is what political opposition does. What it is not is a serious reading of the document.

The procedural character of IBAR instruments is generally accepted across the regional file. Montenegro received its IBAR in June 2024 and the political debate that followed did not turn on whether the instrument was a verdict against the Spajić government. It turned on benchmark delivery. The Albanian opposition’s choice to read the IBAR as a verdict reflects a domestic political calculation, not a feature of the document.

The document praises SPAK. The same paragraph that diagnoses corruption acknowledges “tangible progress in investigation, prosecution and convictions on corruption charges, including against high-ranking officials” and welcomes the “good results achieved so far by SPAK and its courts, including in high level corruption cases.” This is the document the opposition is calling a verdict against the government. The institution being praised in writing was built under the government the opposition claims has been condemned.

According to SPAK’s 2025 annual report, the institution investigated 871 criminal proceedings in a single year, indicted 18 senior officials, and secured 10 final convictions against senior officials. Two former prime ministers are in active prosecution. A former deputy prime minister is a fugitive. A sitting deputy prime minister is under investigation. The mayor of the capital is under arrest. Sitting MPs are under indictment. Former ministers have been convicted in the incinerators dossier. This is the institutional output the document is praising. It is not the output of a government Brussels has condemned. It is the output of an accession process working as designed.

The opposition’s framing requires reading the document as if SPAK were not in it. Remove SPAK and the document does not justify the IGC. Include it and the document becomes what the government has correctly identified: confirmation that the system Albania built is working, with further conditions for the next phase.

None of this argues that the closing benchmarks are easy. They are not. The reforms they require, on parliamentary budget authority, Constitutional Court compliance, Venice Commission immunity standards, investor citizenship repeal, political party financing, asset recovery infrastructure, are significant legislative and administrative undertakings. The Albanian state will need to deliver them. The autumn enlargement package will reflect what the government does in the coming months. The accession process remains conditional, and the conditions are demanding. The diagnostic passages are also not artefacts that can be dismissed. Whether the Council’s diagnosis of generalised corruption is accurate at the level of severity described is a question reasonable analysts can disagree about, and that disagreement has merit.

What this analysis is concerned with is the operational character of the instrument, not the accuracy of every diagnostic phrase inside it. On the operational question, the government’s reading is closer to the document’s actual function. The instrument confirms a milestone and specifies the requirements of the next. The opposition is reading something else, for reasons that have to do with the opposition’s political position rather than with the document’s content.

Brussels did not stop Albania on 21 May. Brussels moved Albania into the next phase.

The benchmarks are set. The parliamentary majority has the votes to deliver them. The opposition can argue that the government will not deliver. The next several months will test the argument. What the opposition cannot credibly maintain on the document’s actual text is that the IBAR is a verdict against the government that produced the progress the document acknowledges.

Brussels moved Albania forward. The opposition is trying to move the meaning backward.