The Double Score and the Empty Chair

On 15 March, former Foreign Minister Ditmir Bushati wrote on social media that Vučić’s return to war rhetoric days after the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung initiative confirmed the familiar double score — one register for Europe, another for domestic consumption — and that Albanian politics was meanwhile expending energy on an Iran resolution when adequate legal instruments already exist. The Editorial Board invited Albatros Rexhaj to respond.

By Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana)

Ditmir Bushati is right about the double score.

Vučić’s performance this week on Serbian state television — announcing that Albania, Kosovo, and Croatia are forming a military alliance to attack Serbia, days after co-signing a joint European appeal with Albania’s prime minister in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung — is a pattern Bushati knows intimately. He watched it from the other side of the table for six years. The statesmanlike register for European audiences; the siege narrative for domestic consumption. Two scores, one conductor.

His diagnosis is accurate. His conclusion does not follow from it.

The double score did not begin in March 2026. Vučić ran it against the Brussels Agreement. He ran it against the Washington Agreement. He ran it against every framework that required Belgrade to signal constructive intent to the West while maintaining strategic ambiguity everywhere else. The mechanism is not new evidence. It is the permanent condition of Serbian foreign policy under Vučić — and it will remain so whether Albania co-signs anything or not.

The question Bushati’s post leaves unanswered is the one that matters: what, precisely, does he propose instead?

Because the alternative to engagement is not neutrality. It is absence. An Albania that declined to co-sign the FAZ initiative would not have retired Vučić’s double score — it would simply have left the European score to be written without Albanian authorship. Vučić would have continued his dual-register approach with a different interlocutor, or no interlocutor at all. The RTS broadcast would have aired either way.

What would have been different is this: Albania would not have been at the table.

That is not a trivial distinction. EU enlargement is moving — slowly, haltingly, but moving — back toward the center of European debate. The phased integration model Rama advanced is not a conceptual breakthrough; variations of it have circulated in Berlin and Brussels for years. What is new is political authorship: an Albanian prime minister, at the height of his regional influence, inserting himself into a design conversation that has historically been conducted over the heads of the candidate countries rather than with them. That positioning does not evaporate because Vučić embarrassed himself on RTS forty-eight hours later.

There is something else worth noting. The RTS outburst — Vučić warning of an imminent military attack from a NATO-member state and a European Union candidate country, on the basis of no credible evidence — was not absorbed without cost. It was widely reported. It will be read in Berlin. It will be read in Brussels. Every time Vučić validates the concern that Serbian foreign policy operates on two incompatible registers simultaneously, the conditionality argument for phased integration becomes stronger, not weaker. The requirement that foreign-policy alignment be a measurable component of any phased approach is not undermined by Vučić’s domestic theatre. It is confirmed by it.

Bushati’s underlying concern — the one beneath the double-score observation — is really a conditionality concern. He is asking: does the FAZ framework contain genuine mechanisms to ensure Serbia’s European integration remains tied to its behavior, including its behavior toward Kosovo? That is a legitimate and serious question. But it is also, importantly, a question about institutional architecture — and institutional architecture is built in Brussels and Berlin, not in Tirana. Albania cannot write the enforcement clauses. What it can do, and what the FAZ initiative does, is insert the conditionality demand at the origination point of the proposal rather than arriving later as a supplicant to a framework already designed by others. The distinction matters enormously. Countries that shape proposals carry more weight when those proposals are tested than countries that merely comment on them. If conditionality is to be real — if foreign-policy alignment and visible de-escalation are to be measurable benchmarks rather than aspirational language — the argument for that linkage is stronger when it comes from inside the room than from outside it. Tirana being part of the design conversation is not a concession to Belgrade. It is the precondition for Albanian interests being legible when the conditions are written.

There is a version of Bushati’s argument that is a sharp warning about vigilance, one that this publication has consistently endorsed: engagement without defined conditions becomes entanglement; integration must remain linked to visible reform and de-escalation. That version of the argument is correct. But that is not the argument his post makes. His post uses the double score — the RTS broadcast, the fear narrative, the preferred game — as evidence that the initiative itself was a mistake. It conflates Vučić’s predictable domestic behavior with a refutation of Albania’s strategic positioning.

Those are different claims. The first is a counsel of conditionality. The second is a counsel of absence.

Albania spent two decades on the outside of the design conversation. The status quo Bushati warns against — the one that cements the Balkan standoff in place — is precisely the status quo that principled non-engagement produced. Strategic vacuums do not remain empty. The region’s unresolved tensions did not deepen because Albania was too willing to engage Serbia. They deepened because the architecture of regional stability was perpetually deferred, and deferred again, by an EU that lacked a serious proposal and a Balkans that lacked a common voice.

Ditmir Bushati served Albania’s foreign policy honorably for six years. His read of Belgrade is clear-eyed and hard-won. But the geopolitical environment he navigated — before Ukraine, before the acceleration of enlargement debates, before Washington’s regional posture became uncertain — is not the environment of 2026. What looked like a stable framework for managing Serbian ambiguity has been replaced by a period of genuine flux in which Albania, for the first time, has something to contribute to the design rather than merely to the negotiation.

Then there is the Iran resolution — Bushati’s second charge. He argues that Albanian politics is wasting energy on a parliamentary declaration when existing law already provides the operative instruments. But the resolution has not yet been voted on: Bushati is indicting a decision the parliament has not made. And even on the merits, the efficiency argument misreads both the context and the instrument. On 10 March — five days before Bushati’s post — the Iran-linked group Homeland Justice breached the Albanian parliament’s servers, deleted data from staff accounts, and claimed to have seized internal communications of lawmakers. It was the third successful attack on Albanian state infrastructure by the same group, operating in direct retaliation for Albania’s alignment with the West and its hosting of Iranian opposition figures. The draft resolution before parliament explicitly names these attacks in its justification. Bushati’s claim that existing law already provides adequate instruments is a legal observation; it does not address why parliament is responding to an active hostile operation against itself with a political declaration of where Albania stands. A resolution is not a legal mechanism — it was never meant to be one. It is a statement of alignment, and at a moment when Washington is watching which partners are unambiguously with it, that statement carries weight. Furthermore, the draft goes beyond existing Albanian law in one specific respect: it calls for the formal designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization and Hezbollah as an Iranian proxy terrorist entity — designations that existing Albanian legislation does not currently provide. The “adequate instruments” argument does not survive contact with the text of the resolution itself.

Nor does it survive contact with Bushati’s own framework. He has identified the Euro-Atlantic relationship as the defining variable for Balkan stability. A parliamentary declaration of where Albania stands within that relationship — at a moment of active Iranian aggression against Albanian institutions, in the middle of a war in which Tirana has aligned itself unambiguously with Washington — is not noise. It is positioning. Which is, on his own terms, exactly what the moment requires.

The double score will continue. Vučić will continue running it — in FAZ editorials and on state television, in Brussels meeting rooms and Belgrade rallies, for as long as he governs and perhaps beyond. No Albanian decision will stop it. The only question is whether, when the European score is being written and the conditions that could actually constrain Belgrade are being drafted, Albania is among those holding the pen.

Read also The Calculated Risk: Why Rama Chose to Sign With Vučić