The Process Has Moved. Here Is Where It Stands.

by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana)

COELA met today. It meets again Friday. A third revision of the Draft Common Position circulates tomorrow. That is not a crisis calendar. It is a working one, and the most important thing it records is a shift that has received almost no attention in the coverage of Albania’s accession process: the discussion has moved from the IBAR report itself to the Draft Common Position, the document that will set the final milestones for chapter closings. That is forward movement. It is where the story actually stands.

Albania is the first country negotiating under the EU’s revised accession methodology, which replaced the older chapter-by-chapter screening model with a cluster-based framework built around benchmarks. The IBAR for Cluster 1, which covers fundamental reforms, is the weightiest document in the entire process. The European Commission submitted its positive assessment on February 26. What remains is member state consensus on the Draft Common Position in the Council. For a document of this institutional weight, under a methodology no country has yet completed, multiple COELA sessions before resolution is not an anomaly. It is the process working as designed. When Montenegro became the first country to receive a positive IBAR in June 2024, the path from Commission assessment to Council consensus required the same sequential deliberation now unfolding for Albania. The timeline, taken alone, proves nothing.

What today’s session confirms is more specific. The Council acknowledged to Albanian media that some progress has been made and that discussions are continuing. The mechanism is on record: member states put questions to the Commission, the Commission responds, the presidency prepares a revised compromise text, and the next round begins. Rev 3 of the Draft Common Position circulates tomorrow ahead of Friday’s session. That sequence is not the rhythm of a blocked process. It is the rhythm of a process being worked, at the pace that a document setting the final milestones for Albania’s chapter closings demands.

The political noise surrounding this period has been considerable and, in important respects, has been built on a foundation that the process record does not support. The leak that generated the nine-country blockade narrative, reported widely across Albanian media in recent days, draws from the March 26 informal lunch meeting of COELA, attended by member state representatives, the European Commission, and Albanian officials. This publication has reported on that meeting in detail. The picture it produced was unambiguous: every delegation that took the floor expressed positive appreciation of Albania’s progress on interim benchmarks and solid support for its European path. Germany expressed support and commended progress, noting the IBAR naturally requires time as it moves through domestic institutions. The Netherlands asked technical questions on defamation decriminalization and IPARD. Greece recognized concrete progress on minority rights and property. Austria commended Albania’s trajectory. The claim that this meeting produced a coordinated bloc of nine countries opposed to Albania’s advancement is not a reading of what occurred. It is a mischaracterization of it, one that has since been raised as an issue inside COELA itself.

The Balluku episode contributed to the atmosphere in which that mischaracterization landed with force. A parliamentary vote on the pre-trial detention of a former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Infrastructure and Energy facing SPAK investigation generated a narrative of institutional obstruction that traveled quickly and arrived in Brussels amplified. The factual record is more limited: the vote concerned a custodial measure, not prosecution; the official is cooperating with SPAK; the government has not taken a single step to curtail the anti-corruption prosecutor’s mandate, budget, or jurisdiction. But the episode revealed something the process record alone cannot contain. What is being negotiated in COELA is not only the IBAR. It is confidence in Albania’s political reflexes. Several member states used the procedural space available to them to apply quiet calibration pressure, raising questions across successive sessions rather than moving immediately toward consensus. That is not obstruction. It is leverage applied through procedure, which is standard Council diplomacy on high-sensitivity files. It implies negotiability. The conditions for extending consensus are political, and the political conditions are moving.

The forward trajectory is clear. Albania has filled 92 benchmarks under a methodology no other candidate has yet navigated. The Commission has endorsed the assessment. The Draft Common Position is in its third revision. Friday’s session is the next moment of substance, with further sessions possible in the following week if the process requires them. That sequencing is consistent with what a document of this weight demands.

The IBAR will be approved. What this period will have demonstrated, when it closes, is that Albania’s accession process is resilient enough to absorb political noise without structural damage, but not so insulated that political episodes at home carry no cost in Brussels. That is the calibration every candidate country learns at some point in the process. Albania is learning it now, on the most important document it has yet had to move through the Council. The record it is building in doing so does not support the conclusions drawn from the noise. It will outlast them.

Albatros Rexhaj is an author, playwright, and national-security analyst with nearly three decades of experience in political and security affairs.