66 rT ansitional Justice and Democratic Consolidation in post-communist aE stern uE rope: Romania and Albania. Democratic Consolidation in Romania’s case But when it comes to democratic consolidation, Romania is shown to be much more robust than Albania and to have achieved it with relative speed. Although it is not the shining star among CEE countries, it has had quite a successful trajectory when compared to Western Balkans region in general and Albania in particular, even more so, after joining the European Union in 2007. Although both Romania and Bulgaria were deemed not ready to join the EU bloc by 2004, when the biggest enlargement of the EU happened and ten countries of CEE plus Malta and Cyprus joined in, they eventually joined in 2007. Presently, Romania has taken for the first time the six-month presidency of the European Union as well as a further indication of democratic strength and credibility, given the political consent that the other 27 member countries have to give beforehand. Romania has an Aggregate Freedom Score of 81 out of 100 for year 2019 (Freedom House, 2019) and it has been constantly and persistently improving throughout the years. It has a rank of 61 in Transparency International regarding corruption perception, including political corruption which is strongly linked to quality of democracy and which is just a bit above the EU-28 average of 66 (Freedom House, 2019), which in itself is one of world best regional averages, although as TI warns in its latest report it “still has a long way to go to tackle corruption effectively.” (Freedom House, 2019). Although it does not help much the campaign against Romania’s past special anticorruption prosecutor Laura Codruta Covesi, in her application for EU’s new European Chief Prosecutor (Gotev 2019), or the recent freezing of relations between European Socialist Group in European Parliament (PES) and Romania’s ruling Socialist Party (Gurzu & Paun 2019). However, Romania’s new role as the current chairing EU Presidency, has brought much visibility, higher scrutiny and additional accountability of the country.15 In addition, the police and prosecutor’s offices tackle much more effectively corruption and organized crime than before and rule of law seems to be further consolidated after the arrest of Liviu Dragnea, the leader of the ruling party PSD16 and the recent confirmation of its former National Anticorruption chief Laura Codruta Covesi as the new European Chief Prosecutor.17 The difference is obvious if we compare Romania or Bulgaria with their counterparts in the Western Balkans. Currently all Western Balkan countries suffer to some degree from some common symptoms such as corruption, state capture and organized crime (Pejic 2019). They all have little true independence of the judiciary, problems with property titles (Vesnic-Alujevic 2012), inefficient public administrations (Durovic & Stojanović 2016) and little political transparency (Kalemaj 2016). A wave of political protests is currently taking place in Podgorica, Belgrade, Tirana and Pristina. Thus, there is a big gap between consolidated democracies such as Romania and yet transitioning countries such as Albania. Transitional Justice in post-communist Albania Transitional justice in post-communist Albania is a topic often overlooked by scholars, at least as compared to the majority of CEE countries. One of the best pieces to date in addressing the failure of an adequate transitional justice process in post-communist Albania has been by Austin & Ellison (2008) where they argue that the three main factors that rendered such process a failure, were the country’s political culture, as well as the impact of the communist regime, and most importantly “the lack of political will from Albanian political leadership to break away from its communist past.” They insist that the country failed particularly with the lustration process, which the ruling class considered “as the political means to crush the opposition and consolidate 15. For example the recent backtracking from judicial reform after strong criticism from Brussels: https://www.dw.com/en/eu-warnsromania-against-planned-judicial-reforms/a-42294820-0 16. https://www.dw.com/en/romanias-ruling-party-leader-jailed-for-corruption/a-48902823-0 17. https://www.romania-insider.com/ep-reaffirms-support-kovesi