The Line the Opposition Will Not Hold

At home, SPAK is framed as captured. Abroad, Albania is framed as lawless. The argument cannot hold both.

Maringlen Cara (Tirana)

On April 20, a week before Ilir Meta’s first substantive hearing, Tedi Blushi stood before the cameras in Tirana and delivered what has become the Freedom Party’s house script. He held up documents. He numbered three cases. He repeated the word “zero” a dozen times. He concluded that the Special Prosecution Office had fabricated the charges against the party’s president in service of Edi Rama, the McGonigal operation, and the international mafia.

The statement rewards close reading because it contains the argument that now governs both opposition parties in Albania. That argument is not that the prosecution has misread the evidence, that its witnesses are unreliable, or that the legal standard has been misapplied. Those would be ordinary defense positions. The argument is that the institution itself, SPAK, is an instrument of the governing party, constructed to target political opponents on command.

This claim has a specific evidentiary problem.

SPAK was constructed between 2016 and 2019 under intense international supervision. Its prosecutors were vetted by a process in which American and European monitors held effective veto power. The architecture was designed to insulate prosecutorial decisions from cabinet influence. Whether that design has held is a question the record answers plainly.

The names are Socialist. Former Environment Minister Lefter Koka and former Health Minister Ilir Beqja were prosecuted over incinerator and concession files. Former Deputy Prime Minister Arben Ahmetaj fled the country rather than answer the charges against him. Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj, long discussed as the Prime Minister’s likely successor, has been in pretrial detention since February 2025. Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku was indicted in a major infrastructure procurement file. Each of these figures sat, until prosecution, inside the Prime Minister’s own party. Several sat inside his cabinet.

These cases do not settle questions of consistency or prosecutorial discretion, but they do impose limits on the claim of direct political control.

Against this record, the Socialist Party has challenged procedure and the quality of evidence. It has not, in any public forum, attacked SPAK itself. It has not described the institution as captured, political, or mobilized against Socialist officials on behalf of the opposition. The distinction is small in rhetoric and decisive in institutional consequence. A governing party defending its own in court remains inside the framework of rule of law. A party that brands the prosecutor political has left that framework.

The Democratic Party and the Freedom Party have left it. The claim that SPAK operates as Rama’s personal instrument is now the organizing thesis of both parties’ public communications, repeated in every press conference, every party statement, every courtroom filing. Blushi’s April 20 text is not a deviation from the pattern. It is the pattern.

Both parties travel to Brussels, Washington, and Strasbourg and tell the institutions there that Albania is a country under sustained assault on the rule of law by a captured Socialist government. They file reports, commission lobbying studies, request priority hearings at the European Court. They describe Albania as a backsliding state. At home, the same parties describe the institution specifically designed to resist that capture as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Prime Minister’s office.

The two claims sit in clear tension with the factual record. A SPAK operating at the Prime Minister’s direction does not indict his deputy prime minister, jail the mayor of Tirana for more than a year before trial, or drive his former deputy prime minister into exile. That is not the typical pattern of a political instrument in the hands of a governing party. It is a pattern of prosecution reaching into the governing coalition’s senior ranks.

The opposition requires both arguments to hold at once. At home, an institution so captured that its indictments are persecutions by definition. Abroad, a country so lawless that its rule of law requires European rescue. The propositions serve different audiences because they do different work.

The domestic frame is a preemptive defense. When verdicts arrive against Meta and Berisha, the story is already written: the court was a tool, the prosecution was political, the conviction was ordered. The international frame is the alibi that makes the story portable. Strasbourg, Washington, and Brussels must already understand Albania as a state where rule of law has collapsed, so that any verdict against opposition leaders reads as confirmation.

This is what the rhetoric is for. Not to defend Meta in court. To delegitimize, in advance, any court that convicts him, and to build the transatlantic audience for that verdict’s rejection.

Mariglen Cara is a staff writer at the Tirana Examiner