Edi Rama, Belinda Balluku, SPAK, when justice knocks, power reveals itself!

By Arian Galdini

Once again a moment arrives when power stops performing and begins to reveal its character.

It arrives when scrutiny reaches the summit, when the law tries to speak in its own voice, and government meets its oldest temptation, to turn a legal process into an atmosphere, to turn procedure into a trophy, to turn institutions into shields.

In recent days, that moment has also taken the form of a date.

According to official announcements, Albania’s Constitutional Court has accepted the Prime Minister’s request to resolve a jurisdictional dispute tied to a measure described as “suspension from the exercise of duty” affecting a member of the Council of Ministers, and has placed the matter for decision on the merits.

In an earlier ruling, the Court suspended the effects of the relevant decisions of the Special Court against Corruption and Organized Crime and scheduled a public plenary hearing for January 22, 2026, at 10:00 a.m.

At the same time, according to public reporting, Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution (SPAK) has formally requested authorization from Parliament for the arrest or detention of the same official in connection with investigations concerning her.

This is where the convenient misunderstanding begins, fed into the noise machine day after day, two legal tracks are treated as a personal duel.

In truth, these tracks follow different logics. The constitutional track concerns competence and limits, the balance of powers, and the outer boundary of intervention in public office.

The criminal track concerns reasonable suspicion, procedural risk, proportionality, and the integrity of evidence.

When those tracks are fused into a single political nerve, the state loses clarity while power gains dangerous ground, the ground where “procedure” is sold as “salvation.”

In such a moment, one sentence can still keep the state on its feet.

The law is the one common line, and in any republic that hopes to endure, even the summit waits in it.

A provisional measure of the Constitutional Court contains neither innocence nor guilt.

It holds only procedural breathing space until the merits are decided.

The distortion begins when that breathing space is rebranded as “normality,” because provisionality starts to read like moral absolution.

That is where power reveals itself.

A government that respects limits experiences a provisional measure as space for adjudication, not as a key to reinstatement.

A government trained by exceptions tends to experience it as an opportunity for messaging, a temporary decision becomes a curtain behind which criminal suspicion is managed as an inconvenience, handled, delayed, reframed.

Within that logic, a prime minister who places himself at the center of the climate and frames an investigation as an “attack on his government” imposes a cost on institutions themselves, justice is welcomed so long as it touches the periphery, and the moment it touches the center it is declared political.

Public reporting has described the Prime Minister’s response to SPAK’s request for parliamentary authorization in precisely that register, denouncing it as a disgrace and tying it to the familiar narrative of “arrests without trial.”

What shows itself here is not merely a position. It is a governing model.

The moral line that separates a republic from a system is rarely drawn by slogans.

It is drawn by restraint, by the willingness of those in office to treat scrutiny as constitutional normality rather than personal offense, and to let due process do what propaganda cannot, test the strong by the same rules as the weak.

Pre-trial measures are not theatrics.

They are the grammar of a serious state.

Pre-trial measures are not punishment.

They are the grammar of a serious state, instruments meant to protect a process that would otherwise be vulnerable to power, evidence, witnesses, non-interference, non-tampering, non-flight, proportionality.

Their logic is cold, familiar, and precisely for that reason civilized. When prosecutors seek authorization for harsher measures, a thesis is being advanced in legal form, procedural risk is read as present, or the conditions of the investigation are judged to require stronger guarantees.

When that thesis is reduced to “spite,” the state cools from within.

Because a society that learns to label scrutiny as disgrace eventually learns to call impunity stability.

And the stability of impunity is only a prettier name for a slow collapse.

Balluku appears as a case.

Public money appears as the test.

A high official under investigation is not merely another name in a case file.

That official becomes, inevitably, a test of the administration’s moral code.

According to public reporting, the prosecution’s request is linked to suspicions over procurement procedures and alleged breaches of equality in tenders, including claims of pre-selecting winners.

In a state that takes itself seriously, such an investigation is not read as a “technicality.” It is read as a radiograph of governance, is the public contract treated as accountable responsibility, or as privilege distributed within a circle?

This is where public office carries a burden higher than the criminal minimum.

The presumption of innocence remains the boundary of civilization.

Yet the ethics of high office occupies another domain, measured distance, accountability, refusal to treat the office as personal shelter.

In countries that passed this test long ago, voluntary withdrawal from function has often preceded the court’s word, not as an admission of guilt, but as respect for the institution one carries.

That culture calms the state because it keeps government away from the temptation to turn itself into an object of adoration.

Parliament is where a republic rises or falls quietly.

Parliamentary authorization is not a party medal. It is a constitutional filter.

And precisely because it is a filter, it becomes a mirror of character.

The moment a majority begins to see itself as a defensive unit for the criminal exposure of its own ministers, the republic stops being a rule and starts to resemble the property of a majority.

This is state capture not as slogan, but as behavior, a vote that no longer asks what the law requires, but whom the numbers protect.

That behavior is more dangerous than open conflict because it lasts, and it whispers.

The reflex is familiar, the law is applauded when it strikes the opponent, and denounced when it touches “our own.”

As long as that reflex remains the norm, every power finds its golden alibi: “the law is not judging me; the other side is attacking me.”

Once that sentence is absorbed by the crowd, the state becomes scenery and habit becomes rule.

This is why support for anti-corruption justice does not need hymns.

It needs something harder, keeping procedure untainted, respecting institutional filters, enduring the discipline of the line.

Justice does not ask for adoration.

It does not ask for fear. It asks for space.

When space turns into stage, power may win a day and the state may lose a generation. When space is protected as boundary, justice looks ordinary.

And in a country exhausted by exceptions, ordinary is the only realistic revolution.

In the end, the law is not a weapon you point downward and a shelter you claim upward.

The law is the one common line, and the summit waits in it, too.

Arian Galdini