Written by Adri Nurellari
The current political crisis in Albania immediately reminds one of the concept of interregnum, described by Antonio Gramsci in “Letters from Prison”. He believed that this phase, when the old is dying and the new has not yet been born, is precisely the time of monsters. The interregnum (intermediate rule) represents a state of historical stagnation where the compass of a society ceases to function. It is a moment of rupture in time, when the old structure that maintained political order, law, economy and a kind of public morality has decayed and is no longer able to inspire or guide society. But, at the same time, the new force that should replace it has not yet created enough muscle or legitimacy to take the reins. According to him, in this uncertain space between the two orders, sick phenomena appear, disfigurements and phenomena that would seem unimaginable in normal times.
But to fully understand this historical moment, we must also turn to two other great Italian thinkers of political sociology: Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca. History, Pareto wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, is a cemetery of aristocracies. Elites rise to power, consolidate privileges, build networks and for a while seem invincible. Then, they gradually become rigid, detached from reality and begin to live more for the protection of privileges than for the functioning of the system. At that moment, their decline begins. History is full of elites that once seemed eternal and invincible and that today exist only as tombstones in political chronicles.
This is in fact not a rare deviation of history, but a law of it. His contemporary colleague Mosca described this reality with even more straightforward simplicity, saying that in every society there is always a ruling minority and a ruled majority. This elite, which he called the political class, controls the institutions and the main decisions of the system. But it survives only if it manages to renew itself, to maintain a satisfactory level of competence, legitimacy and efficiency, and to open up to the new trends and energies of society. When it closes, when it turns into a caste and when privileges become more important than institutions, the system begins to rot from within and gradually begins to disintegrate.
This theoretical framework of the Gramscian “interregnum” and the Pareto “graveyard of elites” is not simply a dusty academic analysis from the beginning of the last century, but a clinical reflection of today’s Albanian reality. The symptoms of a system in its final throes are becoming increasingly apparent to us today when the elite ceases to produce progress and begins to produce only “monsters” (scandals, criminalization to the core, rampant corruption and institutional arrogance). In these circumstances, it ceases to be a leading elite but turns into a parasite that sucks the last energies of an exhausted social organism.
This moment marks the end of politics as vision and its replacement with a series of self-protective maneuvers, where every action aims only to postpone the inevitable and provide a “lifeboat” before total collapse. These are no longer state decisions, but nervous movements that resemble the last steps of a system that feels the ground slipping under its feet. Seen through this prism, recent developments in Albania are no longer isolated political episodes, but part of a predictable historical pattern. In other words, when the caste understands that the old guarantees have fallen, it goes into a state of self-protective hysteria.
In this agonizing phase, the facade of the “modern” state is stripped away and the savage instinct of caste survival is exposed. A brutal proof of this reality was the vote in Parliament against SPAK’s request to lift the immunity of MP Balluku. In this open clash with justice, the masks of reform and the “European passport” finally fell, offering the clearest example of the struggles of a caste that mobilizes to protect itself.
The first reaction is traditionally not political, but financial because when a caste begins to suspect that the system is no longer guaranteed, capital begins to look for escape routes. Assets are transferred to other jurisdictions, investments are relocated and families create bases abroad. This phenomenon has been seen many times in history. For example, in Russia in the 2000s, many oligarchs like Berezovsky or Abramovich began to transfer capital and families to London. Even in Albania, news has already come out pompously about how big entrepreneurs are investing in large properties in the West. Along with capital, foreign citizenships are also targeted as survival insurance. When prominent figures of the elite begin to seek other passports and residence abroad, transferring their families there, then we are dealing with another classic sign of the political history of elite overthrows.
Another survival reaction of the clique is against justice, as seen by both sides in the attack on SPAK. The opposition calls it a tool of the prime minister, while the government calls it “the rule of prosecutors.” When justice begins to affect the elite, it rarely faces legal arguments but begins a process of delegitimization of the institutions that investigate it. Prosecutors are accused of politicization; investigations are called selective, and law enforcement institutions are portrayed as instruments of political opponents. In Brazil, during the Lava Jato operation that also handcuffed President Lula and big businessmen, politicians from almost all parties accused investigators of interfering in politics.
Another typical strategy is to try to change the rules of the game on the fly. When legal pressure increases, political castes often try to change the rules of the system themselves: new laws, new reforms, changes in the powers of justice institutions. The most classic case was Romania, where the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (DNA, otherwise the equivalent of our SPAK there) was imprisoning former Prime Minister Nastase, dozens of ministers and mayors. The then social-democratic government urgently adopted decrees to decriminalize some forms of corruption and dismissed the head of the DNA, Kövesi. Ironically, after the dismissal in Romania, Kövesi was elected in 2019 by the EU as the first chief prosecutor of the European Public Prosecutor's Office, while the socialist leader who dismissed her, Dragnea, ended up in prison for corruption. Something similar was attempted in Albania, both with the "Xhafaj Commission" in 2024, which aimed to "discipline" SPAK, and this year with the initiative abandoned by the Socialist Party's parliamentary group for changes to the Criminal Procedure Code that protect ministers and several other senior officials.
Moreover, when implicating information begins to emerge, one of the first reactions of the clique is pressure on the media. Investigative or critical journalists who expose affairs are portrayed as political instruments, discredited or accused of manipulation. We have seen this with derogatory language, calling them “pots”, undertaking personal lynchings against journalists (such as Fevziu and Lala), excluding them from interviews and public events for “re-education” (such as Ambrozia Meta) or blocking the “Focus Media Group”. In some cases, when the pressure becomes great, the reaction becomes even more dramatic and politicians or powerful figures choose to leave the country to avoid legal proceedings. The case of former Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, who fled to Hungary to avoid prison after being indicted by the Special Prosecution Office (SJO also supported by the West like our SPAK) is one of the most well-known examples in the region. Our main case is that of former Deputy Prime Minister Arben Ahmetaj.
Another symptom of this breakdown is the change in the psychological plane where secrets that circulate as rumors begin to become public. In many hybrid political systems there is a wall of silence where many serious things are known, but are not said publicly. This silence is one of the main mechanisms that keeps abusive castes of power afloat. When the system begins to shake, this wall begins to break and information that once circulated only in political corridors or at private tables begins to become public. Files that once remained closed begin to circulate in investigative institutions, in international networks of law enforcement cooperation, and sometimes even appear in the media. At this stage, something fundamental happens: the fear begins to fade to mention the names of powerful people in crime or business as if they were dirty. Consequently, as soon as fear weakens, the old system begins to lose one of its main control mechanisms.
It should be noted here that in phases of stability, political cliques function through internal solidarity, but when the system begins to falter, this solidarity weakens. Dissensions, information leaks and conflicts between factions of the same elite begin. Information leaks more and more frequently, documents, conversations and materials that were once kept secret begin to become public or circulate in investigative or media networks.
Another symptom is the use of propaganda and conspiratorial narratives to delegitimize investigations. When justice begins to affect the elite, political castes often try to create confusion in public opinion by presenting the process as a political conspiracy, a foreign intervention or a project to destabilize the country. Instead of focusing on legal facts, the debate shifts to emotional and polarizing narratives. This pattern has been seen in many countries where anti-corruption investigations have affected the highest levels of power, such as the case of Croatia. There, during the investigations of the special anti-corruption prosecutor's office USKOK (the Croatian equivalent of our SPAK), which led to the arrest and conviction of former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader for corruption, part of the political elite and the media close to it presented the process as a political persecution and as an attempt to sacrifice some political figures to satisfy Brussels' demands for membership. The Soros conspiracy was greatly nurtured in our country as part of a foreign pressure aimed at limiting national sovereignty.
Here another classic symptom emerges: when legal pressure increases, a strong patriotic discourse is often activated to shift the debate from individual responsibility to the defense of the nation. Investigations and international pressure are portrayed as an attack on the sovereignty of the country. This phenomenon has been seen in Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria or Poland where the European Union's criticism of corruption and the lack of rule of law has often been presented by the respective abusive governments as interference in the country's internal affairs.
When domestic legal pressure increases, elite-connected figures try to build connections abroad that can provide political, financial, or legal support. In some cases, this includes lobbying important Western chancelleries to influence public and political perceptions of investigations. This phenomenon has been documented in several Eastern European countries and Latin America, where politicians accused of corruption have invested in international lobbying to protect or rehabilitate their reputations. It is well known that all major political actors in our country have engaged in international lobbying.
The list of symptoms and illustrative cases could go on for a long time, but what is important is to emphasize the fact that history teaches us that no desperate maneuver can keep a building that has lost its moral and functional foundations afloat. Today's Albania is not experiencing the next transitory political crisis, but is witnessing the decomposition of a caste that has consumed all legitimacy. This painful "interregnum", filled with monsters and nervous convulsions, is only confirmation of Pareto's ruthless law that another caste is entering the historical cemetery of powers that refused to be renewed. The question today is no longer whether this elite will fall or not, but how much it will cost society in its desperate departure. But, like every interregnum that has an end, this dark period also carries within itself the urgent need for a new order, which arises only when the desperate attempts of caste are defeated by the will of a society that refuses to further nourish the last parasites of transition.
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