By Todd Smith
Albania’s political system has not collapsed; it has been quietly captured. Drawing on the logic outlined in Rory Cormac’s How to Stage a Coup, this article argues that Albania exemplifies a modern form of state takeover one achieved not through force or illegality, but through administrative absorption, financial opacity, and the normalization of informality. The result is a system that preserves democratic form while draining it of substance. Reversing this condition will require deep, structural reforms across politics, finance, justice, media, and international engagement. Incrementalism will not suffice. Liberation, if it comes, will be bureaucratic, unspectacular, and relentless.
Albania does not resemble a country in crisis. Its institutions function, elections are held, and its geopolitical orientation is stable. Yet power in Albania increasingly operates outside formal channels, exercised through networks that fuse political authority, economic privilege, and organized crime. This paradox order without accountability is not accidental. It is the defining feature of what Rory Cormac identifies as modern statecraft: the ability to capture a state without visibly overthrowing it.
In Cormac’s analysis, contemporary takeovers succeed by avoiding disruption. They preserve institutional continuity while subtly displacing control. Albania’s experience fits this model with precision. Parliament legislates, but rarely constrains. Courts adjudicate, but rarely unsettle. Elections proceed, but seldom correct. The state has not been weakened; it has been reprogrammed.
International observers often describe Albania as stable. This assessment is correct and misleading. Stability in Albania has functioned less as a public good than as a strategic asset for entrenched interests. As Cormac’s cases demonstrate, stability is indispensable to quiet capture. Disorder invites scrutiny; normality disarms it.
By avoiding overt authoritarianism, Albania’s political system has maintained international legitimacy while steadily narrowing the scope of meaningful competition. Power has concentrated not through repression, but through predictability. In such systems, the greatest threat is not protest but uncertainty.
At the core of Albania’s capture lies financial sovereignty or the lack of it. Modern statecraft, Cormac shows, rests on the ability to move and conceal resources. In Albania, illicit and opaque capital flows freely through construction, real estate, public procurement, and concessions. These sectors are not merely economic engines; they are political infrastructure.
Once laundered, money becomes influence. Influence becomes immunity. Immunity becomes permanence. Arrests, when they occur, are episodic. Asset recovery is rare. The imbalance is decisive. States that do not control capital flows do not control power.
Reversal must therefore begin with finance: comprehensive asset verification, beneficial ownership transparency, reverse burdens of proof for unexplained wealth, and automatic asset freezes pending investigation. Without these measures, reform efforts elsewhere will remain performative.
Albania’s elections are competitive in form but contained in effect. Campaign financing remains opaque. Patronage networks substitute for persuasion. Economic dependence disciplines dissent. As a result, elections ratify existing power structures rather than recalibrate them.
Cormac treats elections not as moral events but as operational environments. Control over financing, media access, and post-election adjudication matters more than overt fraud. Restoring elections as mechanisms of accountability will require radical transparency, real-time disclosure of campaign spending, forensic audits, and sanctions that bite not fines that can be absorbed.
Albania’s justice system illustrates another hallmark of quiet capture: selective enforcement. Law is present, but unpredictable. Prosecutions send messages rather than establish norms. This creates compliance without accountability.
Cormac’s analysis suggests that such systems are stable precisely because they are discretionary. Predictability would empower citizens; discretion empowers networks. Reform, therefore, must aim to eliminate discretion through automatic triggers: randomized case assignment, mandatory prosecution thresholds for financial crimes, and asset seizure as a default instrument.
Albania does not suppress information aggressively. It manages attention. Investigative reporting emerges, circulates briefly, and dissipates. Ownership concentration, advertising dependence, and legal intimidation ensure that scrutiny remains episodic.
Cormac emphasizes that modern power survives by controlling tempo rather than content. Albania’s media environment reflects this insight. Countering it will require structural protections: permanent funding for investigative journalism, robust anti-SLAPP legislation, and statutory access to public data.
Quiet capture extends beyond institutions into society itself. Economic precarity, informal employment, and discretionary welfare create dependency. Dependency discourages dissent. Rights give way to favours.
Reform here is less visible but equally vital: enforce labour law universally, reduce discretionary allocation of social benefits, and expand legal empowerment at the local level. Citizens who depend on patrons cannot hold power accountable.
External actors have played an ambiguous role. In privileging stability over accountability, they have inadvertently reinforced capture. Cormac’s work is unsparing on this point: international recognition can legitimize informal power structures as effectively as domestic consent.
Reversal requires a shift from procedural conditionality to outcome-based enforcement: binding benchmarks, network-based sanctions, and independent monitoring focused on results rather than legislation passed.
Albania’s predicament did not emerge overnight, and it will not be resolved quickly. Cormac’s most sobering lesson is that states are rarely lost dramatically and rarely recovered dramatically. The path forward is administrative, technical, and unglamorous.
The choice Albania faces is not between stability and reform, but between managed decline and institutional sovereignty. Quiet capture demands quiet, methodical reversal. Anything louder risks failure. Anything slower risks permanence.
