When the Prime Minister Chooses Conflict Instead of Reform

2026-02-05 17:22:00, Opinione Luan Rama

If the justice reform has legal problems, the majority has the votes to fix them. The public clash with the institutions shows that the problem is not the law, but control.

For a long time, in fact, not only has Prime Minister Edi Rama's public rhetoric towards justice institutions taken on an increasingly confrontational tone. From a language with a clear tendency towards denouncing and publicly discrediting individual judges or prosecutors, forcefully claiming that the law is always on his side, critical statements, public irony and even direct accusations have now been directed against justice institutions, against the system itself.

Thus, the delegitimization of judicial actions has shifted attention from the debate on improving reform, towards a political clash that highlights serious concerns about the relationship between the executive branch and the rule of law.

The justice reform was designed and implemented with the aim of freeing the system from political interference and guaranteeing the equality of all or each before the law. Therefore, it was presented and used both as a major achievement of the majority and as a new institutional model standard for Albania. Precisely for this reason, the Prime Minister's constant clash with the justice system constitutes a political paradox: the more the justice system attempts to function independently, the harsher the criticism against it becomes.

In everything he has said and continues to say publicly, the Prime Minister has hinted that the new justice system suffers from conceptual, legal, procedural, structural, or even interpretation problems in the implementation of the law.

We are not told that any serious and detailed analysis has been made of the justice reform, its achievements or problems. But, if these problems that the Prime Minister raises and insists on are real and structural, then a fundamental question arises: why are they being addressed through public pressure and not through legal correction? The governing majority has the parliamentary majority and, consequently, has all the constitutional instruments to review, improve or clarify the legal framework of the justice reform.

The reform is not a product of justice institutions, but of political decision-making. The laws that regulate its functioning are drafted and approved by the Assembly, under the leadership of the Prime Minister's majority. The justice institutions do nothing but implement this normative framework. Blaming them for the consequences of a law approved by the Prime Minister himself (he says that the justice reform was carried out by the Socialist Party!), is essentially an avoidance of institutional responsibility.

Instead of a principled and professional debate on improving the reform, a conflict narrative is being built. And especially when criticism comes from the Prime Minister, it does not remain simply a political opinion, but turns into pressure on another independent power.

From a broader perspective, this behavior violates the principle of separation of powers and weakens democratic balances.

The problem becomes even more worrying when this clash is contemplated or accompanied by the usual silence of the academic and university world, of those who paradoxically we are accustomed to presenting themselves to us as the intellectuals of justice. The numerous faculties of law, heads of departments and deans with all sorts of degrees and titles, professors of constitutional law and experts who have the knowledge and authority to analyze these developments, have largely chosen indifference. This silence cannot be justified either as impartiality or as intellectual or academic prudence. It is a sign of a moral and institutional failure.

At times when the principle of separation of powers is called into question, intellectual silence is not neutrality, but rather serves to normalize political pressure on justice and impoverish public debate.

An independent judiciary is not measured by how comfortable it is with the government, but by its ability to act even when its decisions are politically unpopular. The moment justice becomes a problem as soon as it affects the interests of the government, reform loses its meaning and risks becoming a selective instrument.

If Prime Minister Edi Rama is truly convinced that the justice reform has legal failures (in my assessment, the reform is a complete failure), his institutional responsibility is clear: to address them through the Parliament, in a transparent and constitutional manner. Clash with justice does not improve the reform, but only undermines public trust in institutions.

The conflict between the Prime Minister and the judiciary does not produce reform. It produces institutional uncertainty and reinforces the belief that justice is accepted only as long as it does not challenge power. And this is precisely what the judicial reform promised to change.