Albania and the EU’s Convenient Fiction

The European Union has long preferred a convenient fiction when it comes to Albania: that stability, however manufactured, is a sufficient substitute for democracy. There is no doubt that Albania is one of the economic success stories of the Balkans and also one of its most corrupt countries.

The European Union’s views of Albania have been characterised as “stabilitocratic,” referring to a system in which democratic backsliding is tolerated in exchange for political stability. The European Union, like most bureaucratic institutions, possesses an inherent tendency toward self-expansion. Its authority does not grow solely through internal consolidation but through enlargement itself, each new member state extending the Union’s regulatory reach, political influence, and institutional weight. In this sense, expansion is not merely a policy objective but an end in itself.

To facilitate the long-desired EU enlargement, Brussels has for years ignored, and at times supported, democratic backsliding in Albania under the tenure of Prime Minister Edi Rama and the Socialist Party, the direct and legal successor to the former Communist Party. Like similar parties in other former communist states, the Socialist Party has in many cases dressed up only communist-era practices in new garb.

In 1967, under Communist leader Enver Hoxha, Albania declared itself the world’s first atheist state, banning all religious practice, Christian and Muslim alike, and imprisoning, executing, or exiling clergy.

The scars of that campaign are still visible today. Churches and mosques became warehouses, movie theatres, or military depots. Many of those institutions have never been returned, or only partially so. In some cases, religious institutions have been reopened, but the property rights have not been restored. This is deeply concerning.

Another worrying trend is the rise of the Special Anti-Corruption and Organised Crime Structure (SPAK). SPAK is a successor to admittedly far more brutal excesses during Albania’s communist regime. It is using allegations of corruption to silence many of Rama’s sharpest critics, but also those most committed to a religiously tolerant status in Albania.

SPAK is framed in EU language as a tool to combat corruption. It does, however, reveal that its headline cases are clearly political and its policies remain similar to Eastern European security services of the Cold War era.

In March, the Parliament of Albania denied SPAK’s request to lift the immunity of former deputy prime minister Belinda Balluku, who resigned in February. Notably, members of Rama’s Socialist Party broke ranks.

Two other of the most prominent cases involve former President Ilir Meta and Mayor of Tirana Erion Veliaj, who deserve mention for their relevance to faith communities. Both men have endured long pretrial detentions. In other words, with EU taxpayer support, SPAK has contributed to Albania recording one of the highest rates of pretrial detention among Council of Europe member states. Rather than dismantling Albanian criminal networks, some of the most notorious on the continent, EU money has been spent on a measure that has eroded the country’s judicial safeguards.

Nowhere is the subversion of the electorate more evident than in the treatment of Mayor Veliaj, whose detention before trial almost cost him his mayorship. Only when the Tirana Municipal Council attempted to exploit Mayor Veliaj’s detention as a pretext to remove him from office did Albania’s Constitutional Court intervene, ruling that such a removal would be unconstitutional.

President Ilir Meta was an outspoken voice for the return of church property, including scores of Orthodox monasteries left in disrepair since communist times. Mayor Veliaj, on the other hand, was one of the most prominent evangelicals in Albanian public life. The floated idea of creating a new nation as a sort of “Muslim Vatican” for the Muslim Bektashi Sufi order in the outskirts of Tirana shows religious chauvinism and sets a dangerous precedent in the Balkans and beyond. Yet, it is often treated in the Western media as little more than a curiosity.

The Venice Commission has previously found that pretrial detention of democratically elected mayors, especially when prolonged or politically motivated, violates Articles 5 and 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights and directly undermines local governance. Yet, despite the Venice Commission’s clear findings, EU officials have not enforced them in Albania, prioritising the country’s role in European enlargement over upholding the EU’s own principles.

The European Union is, if anything, concerned with corruption in the Balkans. At first glance, the issues of faith and corruption might seem miles apart. There is no doubt that the expansion of corruption in post-communist societies is in part linked to the breakdown of moral structure. This cannot be measured in institutional metrics or accession benchmarks but concerns the moral and spiritual fabric of a society still recovering from a past in which belief itself was treated as a threat.

When questions of justice become entangled with political expediency, and when voices tied to faith communities are drawn into cycles of legal uncertainty, the result is not only civic fragility but a deeper erosion of trust, fuelling corruption. The European Union must recognise that faith communities are not peripheral actors but key contributors to the ethical foundations upon which transparent and accountable governance depends.