By Ben Andoni
It is a fact that Albania now stands a realistic chance of joining the European Union by 2030. Convinced of this prospect, our prime minister even transformed it into an electoral slogan personalized with his own name: “Albania 2030 in the EU, only with Edi and the PS!” In fairness, he does have justification grounded in European geopolitical circumstances.
Albania has been an official candidate for EU membership since 2014 — precisely the year he came to power and, according to him, perhaps for as long as he himself wishes to remain there. Since then, Prime Minister Edi Rama has made European integration the central theme of both his domestic and foreign political rhetoric. One can hardly keep track of his movements: in the morning he is in a local Albanian town, by afternoon abroad, and by evening somewhere else again within Albania. Meanwhile, the opposition continuously reminds the public that the proclaimed reforms bear little resemblance to the daily reality experienced by ordinary Albanians. Various economic indicators — and especially the country’s demographic decline — lend weight to those criticisms.
Within this broader EU narrative, political rhetoric shifts depending on the side speaking. The ruling majority, through its emissaries — who themselves often lack transparency regarding the integration process — advocates for gradual inclusion in EU programs and policymaking structures. The opposition, meanwhile, tends to view the process as a rhetorical trap designed to divert attention away from Albania’s everyday problems. Last Thursday, Parliament included in its agenda the adoption of a parliamentary resolution supporting the process, which passed by consensus with 114 votes from both the majority and the opposition. Yet before the vote, opposition representatives criticized the fact that while the process is presented as technical, it has in reality become deeply political and inseparable from democratic values and standards.
This argument is worth raising because, before the debate, the government circulated a report — clearly prepared by hardworking bureaucrats who deserve recognition for the difficult fieldwork involved — presenting a technical overview of negotiations chapter by chapter, including the measures taken thus far to fulfill the criteria and address the many gaps identified by Brussels.
Far removed from this technical language, however, one thing becomes painfully evident: the majority of our lawmakers possess little real understanding of the process itself. This is apparent not merely in their pathetic speeches and parliamentary discussions, but above all in their ignorance. Veteran opposition MP Jozefina Topalli publicly expressed this concern some time ago regarding Socialist Party deputies, yet the same concern is privately shared by some within the Socialist Party about their own opponents, who increasingly recognize the dimensions of this legislature’s deficiencies. Is this truly the caliber of people drafting our laws? That is the question repeatedly posed, even though the answer is already known. Our era, unfortunately, has normalized even this level of parliamentary composition. The year 2008 severely damaged the quality of the Albanian parliament — and not only the parliament.
Meanwhile, the ruling majority either does not wish to understand — or perhaps merely pretends not to understand — that beyond orders and political discipline there must also be transparency. More importantly, both the public and political class itself must become intellectually emancipated enough to comprehend and engage with the technicalities and rhetoric of the EU. Sadly, this has not happened for a variety of reasons, while the media continues to provide explanatory space to individuals who not only fail to grasp the substance of the process, but who do not even understand the EU’s most basic structures and functioning. It takes little effort to observe this in our parliament, together with the cynical satisfaction reflected in the smiles exchanged between Rama and Sali Berisha over their respective political detachments.
Even though parliament today is heavily criticized — and often anathematized, not without reason — it remains the supreme institution under constant public scrutiny. Yet, whether in East or West, the institution itself has frequently disappointed throughout history. There was once a philosopher who foresaw the decline of democratic institutions across Europe. His theoretical reflections continue to shape debates and intellectual references today. In his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte — the title referring to November 9, 1799, in the French Republican Calendar — Karl Marx bitterly wrote:
“Parliamentary cretinism: that peculiar disease which since 1848 has spread across the entire Continent, keeping those infected confined within an imaginary world and robbing them of every sense, every memory, every understanding of the rough external world.”
And yet, Albania will most likely still enter the European Union by 2030 if it succeeds in closing ten negotiation chapters this year (2026) — thanks, ironically enough, to these very lawmakers, despite Marx’s observation, whose misinterpretation once nearly dragged Albania into ruin itself.