Right, Mister Berisha. Wrong Reasons.

Albania will not join the European Union, and the reason is not in Tirana.

By the Editorial Board

Sali Berisha read the Commission’s Albania report on Thursday and arrived where this publication already stands: no European future on this road. Then he gave the reason, and there we part. He counted more than a hundred demands in the text, put electoral reform first among the urgent ones, named Balluku the impassable wall on the road to Brussels, quoted the sentence asking all sides for sincere dialogue, and told the country that looking for sincerity in Edi Rama is like going to the Sahara to find Eskimos. Remove Rama, he said, and the door opens.

It will not. Albania can replace its prime minister, its government, its governing party and its whole political class, and the grade will not move. Albania is not graded on what it does. The capitals grade what they believe Albanians are, and that belief was settled before this report was drafted and will outlive the next one.

The belief has a shape. A country of clans. A government of smugglers. Courts for sale. Police who beat. A people who leave. Friedrich Merz stood in Budva two weeks ago and described the region in those terms to its own prime ministers; this publication answered with a title, “A German Crime Is an Exception, a Balkan Crime Is a Climate”, and nobody in Berlin has disputed it. On the second night of the October riots the EU Delegation in Tirana told the police to be proportionate; by the end of that week the Health Ministry had counted 169 injured police officers against 82 protesters, and the ambassador repeated the lesson when she handed Rama the report. The report itself asks all sides for sincere dialogue in a city where one side set the dialogue table on fire.

Everyone in Tirana with a grudge, a lost tender, a lost trial, a lost post, knows the address of an embassy. The embassy knows the address of a desk in a capital. The desk knows the paragraph of the report where the rumour goes. Nobody checks it; it fitted the shape before it was told. A story about an Albanian minister taking money passes without a receipt. A story about an Albanian minister refusing money has no form to be filed on.

Tirana has been Washington’s partner under Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and Trump again. It entered NATO when Washington asked, took in the people Washington asked it to take in, sent soldiers where Washington sent them and opened its coast to Washington’s friends. The European capitals despise it for this, and the contempt does not change with the occupant of the White House. No report will print that. A small country that prefers the ally across the ocean to the neighbours across the Adriatic is, in those capitals, an insult that keeps applying for membership.

The Union that Brussels is selling to Tirana no longer has buyers at home. The British left it. The French and the Dutch voted its constitution down when they were asked. One German voter in five chose the AfD last year, and that party now leads the opposition in the Bundestag. Austria put the FPÖ first the year before. The product offered to Albania, a hundred conditions and an annual grade, is the product the Europeans are returning to the shop. Brussels sells it abroad because it can no longer sell it at home.

The Union on offer to Albania exists nowhere. Not in Brussels, which cannot deliver it; not in the capitals, which no longer want it; not in the ballot boxes of its own members. It is a utopia, and a harmful one. It keeps Albania in a waiting room, grading its own ministers on a foreign scale, borrowing its political vocabulary from a document written by people who stopped believing in it. Every government calls the report the best in history, every opposition the worst, and the capitals keep both on a lead. Nobody in Berlin needs Albania inside. They need Albania to keep believing it might be.

You are right, Mister Berisha. Albania is not joining. The shape was drawn long before your name or Rama’s went on a ballot.