By Ben Andoni
Informality and the challenge of the rule of law have held our country hostage for decades, especially since the 1990s. Unlike the other sister states that emerged from the communist system, we drifted onto a path from which today we contemplate, with bitterness, not only our countless weaknesses but, above all, the way we have chosen to build our state. Among them, the wound of informality remains the deepest and most malignant affliction of the post-socialist era. It never forms a scab. We can only keep licking it, like wounded animals soothing an injury, because we seem incapable of healing it.
That is why, amid the endless flow of news about property and its abuse, the stories that pass almost unnoticed are those concerning the cadastre and land ownership. Everyone already knows that this is a jungle where even the most sophisticated GPS could lose its bearings. Today, property is regarded not merely as one of the country’s greatest legal problems—one from which countless others stem—but also as its murkiest, owing to the reckless encouragement of mass migration without any plan, to land occupations, and to the seizure of buildings throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
In truth, neither the governments before nor after King Zog’s monarchy managed to confront the pack of bureaucratic fraudsters who manipulated property laws and inherited titles, with or without legitimate claims dating back to the Ottoman Empire. After the Second World War, the communist regime pushed the chaos even further by confiscating land, homes, and eventually private businesses, all swallowed by the state. Then, in the turbulent transition of the early 1990s, legislation declared that “owners must regain their property.” Yet while ownership was being identified, the “quick ones”—the tricksters—and the “strong ones”—the usurpers—unleashed complete havoc.
The landscape that emerged was extraordinary: a handful of original owners, many of whom died while still seeking justice; others who benefited from the state; and those who acquired land through every imaginable means, dragging one another through courtroom doors. The rush of newcomers descended upon “free land,” erecting houses without permits across the country—one glance from an airplane window while flying into or out of Albania tells the story. Meanwhile, the negligence of the Property Restitution Commissions, their dubious maneuvers, and the cynicism of local officials who hastily issued ownership documents to secure political loyalty pushed the crisis into absurdity.
Suddenly, the same parcel of land had multiple claimants: the rightful pre-war owners holding authentic deeds and the “legal” owners armed with documents issued by the democratic authorities. To make matters worse, Albania failed for years to establish a comprehensive digital property register. In many places, surveyors could not even approach occupied land because of powerful illegal occupants. As a result, plots and buildings were often sold several times over to different buyers.
The thousands who have long joined the list of victims of communism remain silent witnesses to this tragedy, while its consequences now fill European Union reports alongside the endless promises of reform from Rama & Co.
The wound festers further through court proceedings that commonly drag on for ten or fifteen years. Many who awaited verdicts died before ever seeing their property returned. Others expect the same fate, given the grim prospects offered by our judiciary, itself a source of suffering. Meanwhile, the “strongmen”—particularly those connected to Albania’s two dominant political forces, the Socialist Party (PS) and the Democratic Party (PD)—have not only profited from illegality but have repeatedly obstructed genuine solutions.
The result is a climate where foreign investors remain extremely cautious, often choosing not to invest at all. International companies and Albanians living abroad hesitate to build because property titles cannot be trusted. The chaos surrounding coastal land, particularly in Saranda, Vlora, and Durrës, where tourist property has become a battlefield of manipulated cadastres, is enough to inspire genuine horror.
Many emigrants have expressed on the Flamingos platform that they are still fighting to reclaim land once owned by their grandparents, while ordinary Albanians are constantly reminded that they must work harder to regularize ownership in the name of law, statehood, and European integration.
This entire process feeds Albania’s vast informal economy while simultaneously encouraging informal behavior itself. Property owners forced into double bookkeeping, businesses operating under legal uncertainty because ownership remains unresolved—these are only fragments of a much broader reality. Albania’s economy continues to function largely outside formal structures. Many people work without contracts or tax declarations, while countless homes, businesses, and entire neighborhoods exist without legal titles or construction permits.
According to Monitor, Albania’s informal economy is estimated to account for approximately 30–32 percent of GDP. Around one-third of workers are affected by labor informality, primarily through underreported salaries, while one in every five employed individuals works without formal compensation.
The paradox is striking. Post-1990 Albania created dusty offices designed to satisfy European institutional checklists but neglected the GPS systems and surveyors capable of mapping the country properly. Corruption flourished effortlessly because cadastral offices became comfortable shelters for loyal party militants.
Only after 2015, through funding from the European Union, the World Bank, and IPA programs, did Albania begin systematic digitization and aerial mapping, although successive governments alternately accelerated or delayed compensation depending on electoral calculations. Meanwhile, the mountain of unresolved court cases has surpassed 150,000 property disputes. Today, even if the cadastre finally confirms your ownership, the court may simply respond: “Wait another few years.”
This remains one of Albania’s gravest concerns, yet it disappears beneath the sheer scale of the disorder it has created. The Albanian individual has become, simultaneously, perpetrator, beneficiary, victim, and sometimes even casualty of the same system.
We copied Western legislation, but today we wrestle with chaos, institutional distrust, corruption, and a profound lack of professionalism. In the West, institutions are not merely concepts; they are expected to serve the state itself.
In his seminal work The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto explains that, unlike the developing world and former communist societies, Western property rights evolved gradually over two or three centuries. We, by contrast, attempted to construct the same system within only a few years in our rush toward NATO and the European Union. Metaphorically speaking, we have erected an empty institutional shell—the kind Brussels wishes to see—but without the professional culture or competent people capable of giving it life. Problems are still resolved through bribery and personal connections rather than through rules. It is here that the links between organized crime and politics emerge, followed inevitably by influence over the media, political parties, and the courts.
The impression one often gets is that Brussels is primarily concerned with institutions as formal structures and far less with their actual substance—as long as they produce satisfactory reports.
Thus today Albania possesses institutions, yet its citizens do not trust them. Even worse, a political elite has learned how to exploit them. Trust cannot be legislated overnight, nor even within a few years.
This is the pain voiced everywhere—from parliamentary podiums to the Flamingos discussions—and it is a pain for which there is no quick cure. It will take generations before Albanians reach a stage of institutional maturity that no one before us ever truly experienced.
Edi Rama has not managed to climb this mountain, despite Albania’s formal progress toward European integration. Sali Berisha lost the historical opportunity by institutionalizing much of the very chaos that now burdens the country.
No one, it seems, possesses the remedy for Albania’s informality or its fragile rule of law.
And so Aristotle’s observation remains painfully appropriate:
“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice, he is the worst.”
(Homo Albanicus)