“Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” — C. P. Scott, 1921.
Albania falls further in the corruption index
Erblin Vukaj · Originally published: 10 February 2026
In this article
Fighting corruption was among the government’s main pledges to its international partners as it began its fourth term, but the situation appears to have escalated in another direction.
Albania remains among the countries with high levels of corruption, and the trend is getting worse. Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index gives Albania 39 points out of 100, below the global average of 42 and far from European Union standards.
That is a drop of 3 points and 11 places in the ranking compared with the 2024 assessment (42, ranked 80th), which was the highest score ever recorded in Transparency International’s reporting (the lowest was 31, in 2013).
The report’s publication comes at a politically tense moment: Prime Minister Edi Rama’s Socialist government is facing ongoing investigations by the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution Office (SPAK), while the clash between the executive and the judiciary deepened in late 2025 following the case involving Deputy Prime Minister Belinda Balluku.
Balluku was suspended from office by a Special Court decision, and the measure remained unchanged even after the government appealed to the Constitutional Court, arguing that it infringed the separation of powers and the right to govern conferred by the citizens’ mandate.
In this context, the report no longer looks like a technical statistic, or merely a perception, since it corresponds to an institutional reality that has already become an open, everyday political conflict.
What does the report show?
The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) ranks 182 countries by public-sector corruption on a scale of 0–100. The lower the score, the weaker institutional integrity is considered to be.
The CPI is not a survey of citizens; it is based on assessments by economic experts, investors and international institutions. It measures trust in state institutions.
In Albania’s case, trust in institutions remains low, a trend that appears to be found across Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
According to Transparency International, corruption is directly linked to the weakening of democratic institutions and checks on power.
The Western Balkans performs poorly, with an average of 39 points and key problems including political interference in the judiciary, opaque decision-making and the concentration of power.
The countries rank as follows: Montenegro (46); Kosovo (43); North Macedonia (40); Albania (39); Bosnia and Herzegovina (34); Serbia (33);
The report also mentions cases in which major development projects are approved without transparency, increasing the risk of corruption and environmental damage. These include precisely the areas in which Albania has often been criticised: strategic investments, concessions and urban projects, with specific mention of the Sazan development project.
The publication of the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index brings back a reality that Albanian politics rarely discusses: corruption is measured not only in arrests, but in the trust institutions build within society.
The report describes an inverse relationship between corruption and accountability. The lower the accountability, the higher the corruption. This is similarly reflected in perceptions of pressure on judicial institutions: according to the index, when the judiciary is perceived to be under political pressure, institutions weaken and public trust falls.
This also explains Albania’s paradox. Over the past decade, many anti-corruption laws have been passed, the judiciary has been reformed and high-level investigations have been conducted. Yet perceptions do not improve, because the index measures not only arrests, but institutional stability and approach.